LANDSCAPES THAT ARE NONE | LANDSCHAFTEN DIE KEINE SIND
Prof. Thomas Hartmann on the works by Donata Benker
When one painter writes about another, he or she always takes himself or herself as a starting point. No matter how much we strive for neutrality or objectivity – we will always judge the other by our own approach and measure them up to our own yardstick. I never look at the content of paintings. When a work interests me I see and feel in these paintings the very thing that I myself seek. I have also made the experience that, out of the complete works of a painter, only one painting speaks to me – one painting that makes me curious. This was not the case of Donata Benker – her paintings interest me, they stoke my curiosity for her other paintings even as the external form may vary.
Having just returned from a study visit to Finland, it was enriching for me to include her into my class – she was in her 8th semester as a student of the Nuremberg Academy, I was in my 4th semester as a professor at the very same institution.
I hesitate to call Donata Benker’s paintings landscapes because there is no connection whatsoever to the conventional genre of paintings that this expression usually refers to. Generally speaking, there are currently two varieties of landscape paintings: the older kind that seeks to grasp a real, sensory experience of nature preceding or accompanying the act of painting; and a more recent form that denies the possibility of such a sensory experience and explores this very loss. These varieties aim at an authentic experience of nature that is either preserved in the painting, remaining therefore present, or that is evoked as a memory in the picture. Our idea of nature has changed entirely. The idea itself persists but our own thoughts about it, as well as traditional conceptions of it, have been rendered obsolete by reality.
This presentation of the problem – as it is characteristic for landscape painting – does not provide a cogent access to Donata Benker’s landscapes. Her paintings evade this perspective because they do not refer back to external reality but to themselves.
In one of her texts, she says: “The landscape is therefore not only defined by the nature of things but mainly by the thinking of the viewer; it – the landscape – is not only distinguished by naturalness, authenticity or its unspoilt condition – all this is meanwhile almost impossible to find.”
Donata Benker’s understanding of landscape is universal in its nature: it includes presence and absence of people, animals, objects, natural and artificial places. Over and over again, apparently recognizable places or objects appear in her paintings and offer the viewer – at first sight – an associative access to her figurative world. However, once we review the components of this figurative world, while we are looking at the painting, they break loose from habitual and expected associative mindsets and start to create a landscape reigned by its own rules. This precise observation, without judgment, aimed solely at registering what she sees – that is the consensus of her paintings. I don't know who said this: "The real journey is not seeking for new landscapes but to gain new perspectives." This statement holds true for Donata Benker’s paintings. In the class catalogue “Pavilion 15” she describes her work: “A landscape is much more than just a place: it is rhythm, movement, color, light. With all its voices, it tells about things I have no words for. My paintings try to approach the space behind the landscape that eludes our direct view.”
She is well able to deceive the eye. Donata Benker plumbs the difference between the motive and her rendering of the same. Her use of the artist's tools is unflappable and sometimes carries the difference between the object and its painted renderings to extremes.
She is a master of blank spaces. The blanks in her paintings resemble exclamation marks. She does not seek loveliness, even if her color choice might feign it. The pictures are marked by a decided application of paint and transparency of colors at the same time. Thanks to this quality of color appearance, Donata Benker is able to create and maintain the delicate tension between presence of and abstraction from the subject. Her way of painting is more visionary than those of many others. The discrepancies challenge the painter, and she consciously preserves them in her paintings. Donata Benker never uses the pure form; she always searches for the ruptures and the discrepancies she strives to show in her paintings. This encounter is finally the soul of her paintings’ beauty.
The paintings only reveal their hidden life when we refrain from a straightforward interpretation. These new landscapes only become visible when we free ourselves from the painting, they only get close to us as we turn away. Donata Benker’s paintings are all about the tension between the real conditions and their abstractions, between the corporeal application of paint and the transcending of colors, and this is the source of their strength.
Prof. Thomas Hartmann