whose clear, distinctive style is made unique through quality and originality.

Her radical focus on one subject shows in ever new variations today’s ambivalence towards life: the horizontal, the beam, the wall, the fence, the hyphen – they can be the last ruins of a world devoid of meaning, like a desperate lament of all we have destroyed, burnt, wasted, lost.

Or different: the lines are elements of a new beginning, spare, sparse, not yet occupied and defined and categorised. They emit the calm, the solitude, the reflection we need to bear all else.

Carmen Lehmann paints pictures, which are not self-explanatory. Pictures, with exemplary use of paint, on rectangular background – as finished pieces however, far from the usual labels like abstract, cubist, serial. However: undoubtedly paintings from the third millennium. Post-nuclear? From a parallel world?

What were pictures? What is a picture?

A piece of paper and a line. An empty, white sheet and a brush slowly drawing a line, a trace, like a bird’s track in the snow, like a line left in the sand by a stick, like the red marks on the rocks with which humans captured the grace of a fleeing antelope before all we call art. Invocation? Admiration? Who knows.

This is how pictures begin. A picture is colour, which takes on form, and the artist gives it shape. It is the viewer however, who sees objects, feels emotions.

Lehmann’s stroke is thick and dark. Not outline, but main character. It divides the canvas – creating up and down. Sky and earth. Heaven and hell. Emptiness and emptiness. Nothing more than a line. A moment’s contemplation, a pause, evokes an explosion of images in the mind.

Is it caused by the line? By its hidden impact and mass? Is it painted or drawn differently than all other lines on earth? Can such differences even exist? Or is it caused by the observer, who is struck by just this line, as if someone had grabbed hold of him? Because the line turned into the dark river, whence he sat with friends dreaming into the night? Or the black serpent he once feared? Or the long black belt sliding from the lover’s dress?

A line is a sign, an abbreviation, a key, a part of
a whole, universally known, and coming to life in
the mind of the viewer. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the first human contemplated the mark left by his coloured stone on the rock, only few men were in existence. Only the pictures of nature: scree, mountain tops, storm clouds, ocean waves, snowy hills, undulating tree tops, and above it all the majestic celestial bodies, sun and moon, moving across the sky. The straight and the vertical. The round and the curved, form and colour, which change with the light of day.

Thus terms like beauty and harmony may have developed, which are anchored in the cultural stock of humanity through continued reencounter.

Today we drown in pictures, in the countless pictures of things we have created since, and their replicas in art, in media and advertising. Wealth of imagery and visual waste, and the eye doesn’t drink anymore “what it beholds of the golden abundance of the world” (Gottfried Keller). We drown in the too much. All appears equal, Mona Lisa on a coffee cup, the urinal at the museum. The eye can barely be protected. We know all images, we’re sated, but the artist too knows them, carries the entire art cosmos from paradise to pop behind his or her lids and may ask: has not all been said and drawn? Has not everything under the sky found its final form and ultimate expression?

Perhaps these questions define the difference between someone who loves art, and someone who creates it. Because the artist finds what has never been found before. He or she is gifted to create something new on the two-dimensional stage of a sheet of paper, a piece of canvas, a wooden board. Carmen Lehmann starts with a line in the middle of a page. The line grows into a beam. The beam demands colour. It is and remains at the centre of all paintings. It holds the equilibrium. It can be trusted. It stands up. Around it, from other beams and colours, from parallels and equivalents, from opposites and harmony in weight, light and darkness, there is growth. The beams can be coasts, quays, flotsam, grained wood or brittle stone, drift like an iceberg in a green ocean, shine like a faraway fairy island in the mist, rest on calm planes of grass-green or earth-brown, under apocalyptic skies, under soft spring-blue, in the gold of the sun reflecting in a calm lake.

“I start in the middle”, says Carmen Lehmann, “the most beautiful is the still empty canvas, as empty and free and clear as the mind. Then it can begin, owing like a river. The hand tingles, and what forms inside must come out, as against an ache, wants to find its form “

Thus picture after picture emerges. Pictures which are, in their all surmounting abundance, different. Incomparable. To be recognized at first glance.

Yes, Carmen Lehmann knows the great abstract painters, Rothko’s passionate red, the sheer power of the Russians, the effortless elegance of the French. Still, she has her own signature. A poetic, idiosyncratic sparseness, inviting each viewer to encounter him- or herself.

 

Dr. Sybil Gräfin Schönfeldt

(aus Carmen Lehmann Malerei 1997-2017, ISBN: 978-3-932005-70-1)