Christopher Muller

Rolf Hengesbach

Self

Press Release for »Self«, Hengesbach Gallery, 2015

Christopher Muller’s photographic oeuvre has focused on things that surround us in everyday life. Since these are mostly objects of daily use we tend to concentrate on their function and easily overlook their formal qualities and their interrelationships, which are precisely the aspects that Muller has chosen to highlight. How we literally and metaphorically handle things, how things might be interpreted and which possibilities we tend to subconsciously ignore. Furthermore, he has asked questions as to how we use things to structure our domestic space and what time layers, i.e. how much of our lives, are concealed in such structures.

Muller’s photographic work has undergone several phases. This can be seen in his different treatment of object groupings and his changing approach to the medium. Muller has photographed arrangements of objects as well as found constellations. He has photographed objects frontally against a wall to create a static impression and from various angles. At first glance his early pictorial approach appears more neutral than the subjective viewpoint in his later works. He has increasingly incorporated devices such as perspectival alignment, cropping, framing and focus. Materially however, his pictures have always been a chemical product resulting from an exposure by a mechanical apparatus.

In his new exhibition he is showing paintings for the first time. These works also deal with objects but have been joined, for the first time, by his limbs. By incorporating his own body he is fundamentally shifting our relationship to things. Not only is the body engaged as a pictorial element, the pictures themselves are produced by the body’s fine motor skills. Muller has developed a new pictorial space to interlink this doubly accessed self, which can be described as the immediate vicinity. Viewed within its immediate vicinity the body becomes both an object and an active agent in two senses, extending out into the space while also painting it. This has consequences for the pictorial space which is no longer separate and independent but linked to the body leading to paradoxical doublings: while the fine motor skills of the right hand compose the image, the left hand is positioned adjacent to the viewed object. The body is conducting a dialogue with itself as an object to be examined, as an active agent that extends outwards and as a sensorium that interacts with and also registers its environment. All objects in Muller’s watercolours seem tangibly present even when no body parts are depicted. We see ourselves very differently depending on our changing personal situations, possibilities created by social interaction and the various ways in which we detach ourselves from or identify with our environment. Our first tentative steps in this world are spent distinguishing ourselves from other things in the immediate vicinity. Muller’s works clearly state that such distinctions undergo subtle shifts throughout our lives and that redefining the balance between confidence and withdrawal, receptiveness and diffidence is a daily experience.

The immediate vicinity radicalizes the ambivalence of apparently unambiguous properties. We may learn to correctly attribute a thing to ourselves or to something else in our environment. Nevertheless we seem to need to redefine ourselves daily in terms of the shifting power balance in our surroundings through touch, observation and changing moods. In what sense does the outstretched pink-and purple-coloured formation in front of me, the foot, really belong to me: matter-of-factly as something I can observe, emotionally as a benign and integral part of my body, subjectively as a vehicle for moving or braking on my way through the world. Does the foot enable me to feel the cool floor or the softer fabric of the chair; does a sense of comfort emanate from it? Things are incomplete in our immediate vicinity. I don’t perceive the floor in its entirety, only certain aspects: its smoothness, its pattern, its warmth, how it reflects light, the area directly in front of me awaiting my next step. One can place things in a neutral descriptive frame but in the immediate vicinity they are inseparably linked to my fate and I to theirs. In this tempered dialogue the emphases regarding priorities or minutiae, correspondences or distinctions is forever shifting. In order to describe the immediate vicinity in an adequately differentiated way, Muller has explored a painting technique that demands a special aptitude in order for fine motor skills to prevail over the material’s incalculability: the watercolour. Watercolour technique must cope with the dispersion of water and the associated appearance of colour pigments. Furthermore water as a medium is closely related to our sense of our body’s insides and the tactile qualities of our skin.

The addition of smaller and larger water spots only refers indirectly to our world of material entities. Complete entities are not directly transcribed but derived additively and frequently only hinted at. The eye consciously plays an active role in interpreting the “water islands”. Muller’s goal is neither a precise and detailed drawing or representation of things on a two dimensional plane, nor the meticulous rendering of solidity and statics. Other priorities are required to resolve the loose and fluid texture. The watercolour is predestined to relinquish a material conceptual interpretation of the world and give free rein to the possibilities of an explorative, subjective approach.

Delicate forces dominate Muller’s tapestry of colour washes. The shape of a spot is always orientated in a polarity of directions, determined by what pushes against the edges of the spot and whether counter-spots take on the force, continue, stop or divert it. In addition choices are made regarding the intensity or density of the overlapping layers of colour, which texture the force, and the degree of transparency. In a watercolour the world seems to shimmer through. This is primarily due to the unadulterated white of the paper being the lightest layer and the soluble colour pigments drying as fine translucent layers over it. How clearly an object or a body part is formulated is largely determined by the degree of transparency. The more transparent, the lighter, the more open and freer and less fixed the denotation. In this respect, each sheet is a complex dialogue between the limited incursion of things and the simultaneous opening up of the environment to subjective penetration, isolation, dynamism and detachment. Painting a watercolour of a leg in my immediate vicinity means bidding farewell to a preconceived idea of a final version of things. The leg grows step by step in a rhythm of layers and washes and it has to fit its neighbourhood: it can only grow in conjunction with its neighbourhood. This involves making choices similar to those involved in the subjective interpretation of ones own sensitivities and their scope.

Muller’s new works return us to the beginning. How can we rediscover ourselves every day anew when we stretch out our feelers and attempt to take in the world? Our basal self appraises and adjusts to situations in which we and the world must come together. In our immediate vicinity we are not simply attempting to describe what the leg, our means of transport, looks like or how our means of action, our hands, are physically constituted but how we construct a room for manoeuvre, establish our identities and how the former can accommodate the latter. Finding oneself and coming to terms with oneself within a particular environment are at the heart of Muller’s delicate water tapestries.

Untitled, 2013, 32 x 24 cm, Watercolour on paper