As it appears

How do you talk about art and here and now about this particular painting?
With a comparative and perhaps historically educated view, which discovers historical or contemporary parallels, or records changes, breaks, perhaps to an incomparable mode, a singular style, in the title - the literally attached note - its designation, or in the name of this singular person to designate the artist.
The how of comparison can give clues to see more precisely or to discover something different in the difference, if it does not press itself onto the sensitive surface of the painted, in order to be content with an economy of recognition in both cases, the supposed sameness and the probed differences. - An economy of recognition that is always recognition, in the uneducated as well as in the educated and practised, and especially when the typical functions as a "brand", a brand of the market,

Strange - when, as if by chance, very different viewers - on this or that picture, you say the apparently same sentence about something that naturally eludes: the light: the light here - a little like Turner's, but painted differently and especially painted differently. And therefore quite different in a comparison that necessarily arises.
One still speaks. But you don't look to speak. You haven't seen when you look to speak. One has not seen enough and the duration has failed.
Perhaps the silence in this picture, which comes a little louder or stronger. In this one that seems to allow itself to disappear gently. And in that area in this picture that draws in from a distance like something that has blown away.
Careful metaphors for a painting that literally reveals far from any symbolism,

But what is the light like? Can there be light? The light and nothing else? You wander, perhaps, and if you are lucky, to approach. Perhaps the clearing - as what is to be seen. Clearing * as an open one. Not the light or dark place, but what shows beyond all dimensions. An outside that would be without measure and therefore no other where is. One speaks across all orientations of the language.
So you show: here this contour, this movement of color, of the lightness in the dark: this here.
One speaks to show, or shows to keep speaking going, to keep it from breaking off. Because there is, precisely at this break-off there is - which one may be surprised about - a wanting to share as to communicate. At least one announcement: You no longer necessarily say: this is nice, perhaps more like: this is really good, or simply: it has something

The something - is it even the light? The light of the sky or that of the water, literally.
Light, for example, if it reaches us from a past, and in spectral analysis allows us to find even the most distant matter or states.
We don't fix it here like the red on cinnabar. And yet one does not stop attaching it to something, to that from which, half swallowed, it may come towards us and concern us. Conversely, knowing or thinking keeps us from invisible relations, not from an apparently unmediated there.
A da of painting itself or that of a landscape - whose Japanese name, according to Heidegger, would be “painting of” something.
The language, however, skips it with the difference between the representation of what is represented as that which is previously present or that which is first presented. It takes away the game of presence and absence from the Da itself.
In this painting, however, and perhaps now at eye level, nothing invites us to find those boundaries: That of the non-representational as one of painting or one of nature. That is, that of the formed, the form and the formless, even if one can further say: the limit of the formless of nature in painting. The ability to see is always already moving within it in this moving border in painting, in nature and in nature in painting.

Does one speak, then, only to prove the inadequacy of the economy of language, to put up warning signs? Or is there also a departure from here - perhaps somewhere along the way - something that comes close to "it has something", not to say that which eludes as unique and singular?

The terms and their negation, their respective "without" - measure, form, shape, etc. - mark the difference between the beautiful and the sublime or sublime. - mark the difference between the beautiful and the sublime or sublime in the tradition of aesthetics - coming from aisthesis, perception or looking at - right up to contemporary thinking. And both, in their own way, get in the way of the ordinary of our perception and understanding, but above all of the identifying speech about something as an object. At the same time, their distinction is established by the difference between the harmonious and the disharmonious, which turns into itself - upliftingly - as a "negative pleasure", associated with the formless or the violent. Two ways of being in tune that one only with difficulty withdraws from that distribution, according to which one is not dealing with ways of the world in being-in-the-world, but with an inner feeling clamped into the distribution to a world of objects.
Regardless of how in Kant's transcendental thinking the sublime as “spirit feeling” expresses the unconditional of the idea of ​​freedom, as completely detached from an “adverse” that it is able to trigger, it always marks a limit of unrepresentability, the reference to the infinite as non-sensible in the sensual.
In contrast, beauty in aesthetic judgement corresponds to a favour of nature or that of the observer who meets it with favour. In the formality of beauty according to Kant, it is our "imagination, which is not committed to any concept and which plays, as it were, in the observation of form", then also understood in radicalised terms as the free design of "arbitrary forms of possible views "**. Where we thus assume - in the course of our usual cognition as recognition - a re-presented "object" or one that is first presented in its unique being seen, one that is not only left to painting for this very purpose, but one that precedes it, a mobility of perception into unexplored possibilities of the spatial-temporal is no less challenged. Thus, it is painting that challenges this ability and opens up the liking associated with it.
Conversely, however, the sublime is not simply achieved in the required breaking off of all references, as if this were the equivalent of the "raw", elemental nature of which Kant speaks. Especially since the call "The Sublime is now!" (Barnett Newman) is its impossible objectification, since it reaches precisely to the >is< in its existential dimension and thereby undermines the >now<. It is not only in the intangible that the orders of time and space begin to falter. In the incomprehensible, which seems to spring from the raw and dynamic, the immeasurable of nature, when the power of imagination fails, it can no longer summarise it into a possible shape.

Shall we say that the terms that have been handed down to us are inappropriate here, not only because one does not want to use them in order to find an example for them without hesitation in, and precisely in this painting? Or can one only begin to speak of them now and in the jumping exit?

A beautiful in the sublime, or rather a sublime in the beautiful. At least a hint - with this perhaps inappropriate application.
How does space move here as this light and colour? As dynamis and energeia - the old words for the possible and the real. As the dynamism of the elemental, which obeys a different law than that of the one that rises from a failure in the infinite or the adverse. There is no human being here as a small figure of the observer. This "painting of" does not open up a visual space that one enters like a landscape in order to move through it. Rather, it never leaves seeing in front of it, but takes it with it into its own outside... A gentle law of forces as energeia.
There is an there is - that is a favor or a gift. The violence of the elemental has not disappeared, but it is sublime, it shows itself in a different light, almost like a fine brushstroke.

Gerda Ambos-Oladinni

* Some of the formulations here are half-way, maybe necessary half-way and, in an attempted in between, are based on Kant and Heidegger. - For both, compare Jacques Derrida: The Truth in Painting (Vienna 1992) - a title that alludes to a quote from Cézanne.

** Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Judgment §16, §22 et seq .; Kant's controversial demarcation against the materiality of perception is above all one against the naive empiricism, according to which what is seen is imprinted in us like a stamp, and also one against enjoyment that takes pleasure in bright colors, for example, the question of a differential or mobility in color perception itself remains open.