Vera Ida Müller

Photographic souvenirs or 'snapshots', as we somewhat demeaningly call the immortalized moments of our family lives, are a firm part of our culture. They lurk in their hundreds, in lovingly tended photo albums, in slide boxes and in drawers, as permanent mementos of our past. They tell of our grandparents' engagement, of the bride's dance with her father-in-law, of the baptism of the firstborn and of Christmas eves from long ago. They remind us of our first times on the ski slopes, camping holidays on the Adriatic, or the newly purchased Peugeot 504. They record the first day at playgroup, the festal blowing out of candles on the birthday cake, and Sunday promenades with uncle, aunt and cousins.

These depictions of family rituals are mainstays of our identity.

They show, and help us to remember, where we come from and who we are. Only when we no longer need them, or when those who hoarded them are dead, are photographs relegated to the cellar or loft. And when relations with the people in the pictures no longer exist, and memories have long since begun to fade, the pictures lose their significance. They are disposed of, ending up with other household cast-offs in the bric-a-brac shop or at the flea market. There Vera Ida Müller was given a gift: a holdall stuffed with memories, possibly in an act of generosity, or even in relief that someone was willing take these former family heirlooms and find a new use for them.

The artist has used photographs she received this way as models for her latest works which, based on her own experience, she has called 'Memories Given Away'.

She selected suitable specimens from this treasure trove and painted them in several layers of oil colours on a white substrate. But this process radically modified the picture content. Neatly omitting background, blurring contours and painting over individual features of the pictures created quiet, unspectacular pictures in small format. They depict objects, architectural features and mask-like people or animals. Individual figures are shown only in part: an arm is missing here, the legs there. Sometimes the artist has completely cancelled individuals from a group photograph, so that the boy in the front row is suddenly left standing alone. This approach, typical of Vera Ida Müller's painting, gives the contents of the pictures a new, increased significance. Unclear and blurred outlines deny the eye a focus and leave it to roam the depths. The married couple fading into the background of the picture, the woman with the stoneware standing in a no-man's-land, the boy playing awkwardly with his dog: all become pictorial embodiments of the hidden, the muted and the unspoken. They become impossible to put into words. Vera paints out of the pool of these memories, quiet and unspectacular. The artist has expelled the contours from her pictures. It is as if they are faded or dissolving, as if they showed the vagueness of a reality which is now only a memory. Her concern is not to depict reality, but to illustrate the inner pictures, the internalized recollection. To re-execute the photographs in paint is a slow or, to be precise, a long drawn-out process of approach to the core of the picture. But only this makes it possible to instil atmosphere. Fragmented, diffuse and inward-looking, Vera's work actually shows what she does not show. When there is almost nothing left to see, you see nearly everything. The disappearance of the picture is her theme, and she makes it into a surface for the projection of personal experience. The pictures we see are still, petrified and empty. They leave it to us, the viewers, to read into them what we will. In these paintings, with their throwaway effect, we recognize undeniable framents from pictures of our own past. They quicken our memories of our own experience, like an uncanny detail of a dream or the ungraspable importance of a deep-rooted image of childhood. In impasto colouring, they look like fleeting snatches of memory.

Pictures like the models used by this artist are both metaphor and medium of our memory. Roland Barthes, for example, refers to the magic of photography as a resurrection of the dead. For all of us, the photograph is both prompt of our memory and proof of its authenticity. Often, however, it is superimposed on the actual memory. Thus today I can no longer tell whether my memory has been influenced by repeated looking at the picture. Much of what we remember depends on how many occasions we find to recount it. In fact the more often we tell a tale, the more we remember the words we used to tell it last time. Even so, as individuals, we need pictures as proof of our experience, to evaluate it and anchor it to the real world.

And Ida's painting is just as deceptive as the purported authenticity of our memories. Indeed, the issue here is not really painting at all, but the loss brought into the picture, or whether it is possible to imagine things, situations and subjects at all. The human figures come across like larvae - absent, melancholic, apathetic and masked. There is a play with the sensitivities, with emotional irritation and foreboding. The suspicion is that the pictures we see and cherish within us are not what they are. Maybe they do not show us the ultimate truth. Chasms may yawn behind. There is a sense of suppression, of a will to be forgotten. Vera Ida Müller's painting is a meditation on depiction and image. Her pictures turn back the viewer's gaze like a mirror, directing it inwards, into the onlooker. The silence is intense, but the silence or void is filled. Luc Tuymans, a Belgian artist whom I would claim to be akin in spirit to Vera, says on this point:

"A feature of a good picture is that the viewer still adds something to it. Something totally worked out no longer makes sense. So it is crucial to draw back as a painter and to stay somewhere, specifically at the point where something remains undefined. It is at that point that the tendency to reduce comes into play. The importance of this factor in painting is growing. The attention span in front of a picture in a gallery is just fifteen seconds. That is why it is necessary to reduce a picture to the point where it is still comprehensible, or ceases to be so. This, precisely, is where the viewer questions the picture."

But the artist herself should have the last word. Two years ago, aged just 22, she said about her work, "my aim is to give viewers the chance to merge with the picture, to marvel at recognizing a story, past or present, and perhaps even at recognizing themselves. I allow beauty and brutality to overlap, and tempt people to choose one of the two. At that precise moment, it is you who finish the picture to form something new, purely by your feeling."



Dorothee Messmer