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Lutz Weidler:  The Landscape model as an aesthetic concept

The sculptor Lutz Weidler refers to his square-cut, relieflike objects hanging on the wall as „Weltmodelle*“ (*Welt usually translates with world or earth but Weltmodelle is here freely translated with models or concepts of Landscape): Excerpts, views of the world, seen from a bird's eye view. Altough one could assume a mimetic quality at first glance, they are no mimetic illustrations of landscape, like the ones you can find e. g. on the internet. Such are at most a possible source at the biginning of a work. Weidler does not modell in a sense of „replicating“ but in „building“ a form; he creates new and distinct worlds of images. By doing so, his view of the world is always ambivalent; it is at the same time one of a „scientific researcher“ and one of a „magician“. While one dissects the world and analyses in order to depict exact verity, the other tries to mystify things, not to withdraw their secrets, but to bring their immanent force into affect in the imagination (the one of the spectator, too). By this, the artist follows a tradition of the surrealists, who, like Andre Breton conjure up „...the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought....“* .

Weidler creates a playfull collage of real and fictional elements, using different materials, colours and forms as a sort of three-dimensional snap-shot of a small, potential excerpt of world. Fascinated by the technical precision and irritated by the absense of scale in the models, the beholders own associations and experiences are being awakened.

We might have experienced how the view from above can change our perception, how men, objects, houses, cities, landscape can become abstract and loose meaning with growing distance, this we might have experienced by ourselves in a plane ride. When, above the clouds, landscape and ocean are withdrawn from our sight, we raise awareness that our planet earth is just one of countless celestial bodies in space and the meaning of our own existence becomes relative... At the end of the flight we are glad to come closer to things again. We discover paths, traces in the landscape: traces of animals or of men? Do their lines run towards a certain point? What could be there? ...We are happy and relieved to return to a scale we are able to perceive.

As already said once, every excerpt documents the state of a certain moment. By varying single motivs again and again, Weidler emphasizes the processual quality and the continuency of his work and points, on a level of meaning, to the alterability and the equivocality of what we suppose to apprehend.


* Andre Breton, Manifeste du Surrealisme

Marion Koenen-Ronkholz
translated by Julika Bosch

 

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