Leseprobe

5 The resulting transluency not only creates a mutual permeability of layers of paint and painting media, but also permeabilities as a kind of membrane for different senses of perception. The sense of sight and color, the sense for movement and the sense of hearing form a synaesthetic whole. But what color does silence really have, does it really sound blue? 1 In the cultural-historical context analo- gies to the attitude of mind of the early German Romanticism – to the Blue Flow- er , which was frequently invoked at that time – are invariably imposed, as, for example, the poet and philosopher Novalis believed that poetry would con- fidently heal all wounds inflicted by rea- son. However, his radical demand for an all-encompassing romanticization of the world must still seem very contempo- rary, if “romanticizing the world means perceiving it as a continuum in which everything is connected with everything. It is only through this poetic act of romanticization that the original totality of the world in its actual meaning in the work of art becomes suspectable and communicable“. 2 Thus, Conny Luley‘s consistent method of working over a long period of time led to the creation of a series of canvases that can be perceived as singular tab- leaus in their own right, as well as in the transition from one image to the next or vice versa. In these cases, the individual images are able to merge into one sin- gle pictorial space, like an almost cine- matic sequence – slow forward or re- wind – and the supposedly defined starting and ending points of the paint- ing even merge into an imagined visual loop of infinitely continuous nature perception. Read at different speeds of vision, this first sounds mildy, then begins to rustle brighter, lights up, and then continues to quench the light in the dark. In her novel published under the meaningful title “Anatomie der Wolken” (Anatomy of the Clouds) (2015), Lea Singer allows the set-ageing Goethe and the frenzied young landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, the opponents of two epochs, to clash. While the main representative of Wei- mar Classicism was only concerned with the analytical classification and a 1 Conny Luley, take a walk in the blue silence, exhibition in the showroom, Kulturverein Proviso- rium, Nürtingen 9. 7. – 30. 7. 2019 2 cited in Burkhard Reinartz, Novalis – The Romantization of the World, Deutschlandfunk 25. 8. 2014 3 Lea Singer (actually Eva Gesine Baur), Anatomy of the Clouds, Hamburg 2015, p.253 kind of illustration of natural phenome- na from the hand of a visual artist – especially of the sky and clouds – the passionate romanticist was more con- cerned with empathy for nature itself. In any case, he explains to the person he adores in the book: “You know, [...] the greatest thing is that we can dream in the clouds. No matter how bad the world is and how evil people are.“ 3 CLEMENS OT TNAD Stuttgart, July 2019