Reinhard Ermen The Picture Happens Organisms and Naturalism in the Drawings of Nora Schattauer

The order is immediately apparent. The modules, identical and similar elements, are organised often

enough in rank and file, in lines, they gather into lattice structures. It is about building, yes, about

construction. Exceptions confirm the rule. Nora Schattauer works with a constructive 'all-over',

composition in the traditional sense, that does not have to be the equal balance of individual features,

actions and positionings; equilibrium is established through a certain symmetry. However: order, as

Biedermann loves it, does not happen because that can kill; and the all-over, a category of recent art

history, happens almost by chance, exists as, so to say, in the nature of things. Schattauer makes the

most obvious thing that is conceivable. Perhaps her pages, written in a figu- rative sense, are offered to

readers who imagine for themselves a somewhat complex form of text in them. The desire to know what

that is, the cre- ative curiosity to obtain verification, runs along- side. These pages are far away from

traditional images, although they simultaneously build enough bridges to meaningfully locate recent

discourses. Neither does Schattauer strive towards a monad- like type of existence. On the contrary, she

inter- venes as an artist and curator. Initially, other areas of association admittedly come to mind before

the primary artistic character that is intrinsically inscribed into these pages: cellular structures,

microscopic worlds, looking as if they had been enlarged to gigantic proportions, with appropriate

colouring or so: discreet and mysterious at the same time. Building could be replaced by growing. The

constructions emerge in a dynamic manner, sometimes they fall, in the truest sense of the word, out of the

series. Yes, the general view now seems to be the snapshot of an organic tremor.

The organic growth of the series corresponds to applied chemistry, sometimes the artist herself speaks of

'image chemistry'. This phenomenon in Nora Schattauer's work has often been described. For Schattauer

this is the conditio sine qua non. She paints and draws with a pipette, she lays silver, salts, copper,

chrome or iron on appropriately pre- pared grounds. The materials react, they penetrate the capillaries of

the quality Japanese linters paper till the moment of crystallisation. The reactions leave natural traces

behind, occasionally wreaths and cells softly bump into each other, transitional and blended areas occur at

the modular walls. The placed points 'bloom' over time in the areas touched by the materials; Schattauer

had already attempted the flowery term herself when she showed works from 2003 in the Kunstverein

Cuxhaven: potassium ferrocyanide, copper sul- phate and sodium chloride on plastic foil on glass or in

silica. The material fades, in the figurative sense, like a sound, in the transitional areas poly- phonic

frictions, pallid dissonances or infinitely soft mixtures can occur. In any case, this is an art that, if the

vocal metaphor is thought through further, plays in the dynamic range of piano to pianissimo. The

fundamental constant is the osti- nato. A sensitive method of alignment overseas the organic growth that

simply happens from a certain moment. The artist sets up her elements and gives the go sign, the rest is

'experience', for the willful materials chosen and set up by the draughtswoman take care of the crucial

process. The single cells grow out of the energetic potential of their chemical reactivity, the cellular

structure of the whole is thereby the result of the starting parameters. With all the naturalness that is

charac- teristic of these organisms, the comprehensive view of the ornamental all-over comes from a dif-

ficult to define feeling for becoming, itself. The abstract construction with its growing, even ram- bling

linear forms is perhaps the approximate rep- resentation of something seen, formulated in the vocabulary

of pathos: something looked at that is put in concrete form on the page. Art becomes the resu lt of an

indirect, an almost second nature.

The organisation and the partially self-running process form a type of productive contradiction. To

summarise: the image happens in the ground prepared for it. It is like blind drawing. What happens in the

dark can only be registered when the light comes back on, when the eyes are open again or if Nora

Schattauer removes the flimsy carbon paper. For, analogous to the process that her alchemy initiates, are

drawings that look like conventional line works. Conventional does not mean, in this instance, a

downgrading but a good working practice. She captures waves ('water'?) with slinky parallel structures,

with grey or black bundles of lines. The cellular all-over is far away. A naturalistic appearance that

presupposes the seen or the felt again comes into play, but refers to a fundamental constant of

Schattauer's work just as much as the indirect access. It apparently needs an intermediary, something that

allows a distance between it and the ground. There must be a certain amount of freedom for art and mate-

rial. The script wants to be more organisational

in nature rather than be considered the setting for a personal fingerprint. The pen scratches the wafer-thin

carbon paper, presses the material onto the white paper. The linear work is accom- plished in the

approximation, it is a testimony to

a deliberate but unseen trace. In the other works that are in focus here, the chemically stimulated material

is absorbed into the body of the paper and seeks its own way. When dry, when the crys- tals are formed

the artist, herself, becomes its first viewer. Sometimes the reverse of the paper

is like a revelation for the process usually takes possession of the whole volume of a paper: in a certain

way, objects develop. Only then can the decision of whether a page is good enough for public viewing is

made. In any case, extensive experiments, perhaps even artistic, creative basic research belong to the

whole, and have their own optical attraction. Again: the image happens, but it is not wrested from the

hands of the artist. The invisible spirit hand definitely does some of the drawing as well. A mystery is

always left surround- ing dealings with earths, sulphates and salts. Perhaps that is a kind of constructive

surrealism that is conceptually reassured, even controlled.

Writing has already been mentioned, but what was explained? Constructed organics as artificial natural

history? For that, Nora Schattauer cer- tainly uses the materials far too much in their autonomous

authenticity. If nature participates and co-organises, the explanatory text would be here as a matter of

course and then, at most,

a discourse on the medium and it specific natural- ness – to stay in the picture. The question of the

creature that it is (in contrast to what is repre- sented) helps verification. Medial questions of being are

sources of friction for the perception.

A defined balance helps seeing! Of course, until now, the term, drawing, and its kindred derivatives have

been dealt with. But is that actually drawing? Does the classic question of linearity help in the search? If

lines are in charge here, then preferably softened ones: soft variants. Yet what is soft? Under a magnifying

glass, even through a micro- scope, the rambling linearities fan out into bundles of the finest capillary

graphics whose colour nuances are entirely beyond the everyday. In case of doubt, they are works on

paper, yet there are also other carriers, for example, canvas in an appropriate frame; but that does not

automati- cally make the works into painting. Without ques- tion, it is about medial in-between existences

that, to set a preference here, rather help to extend the horizon of drawing. It is ultimately a medium that

is receptive and open like no other, and

has still retained its innate classicism. Directives apply in this sense, even when Schattauer, for example,

moves towards photography. Photogra- phy has in any case, as a persistently flat image medium, a

resistant, conservative basic honesty. That will be whitewashed in the mightily agitated mutterings of the

markets. Photography, even when handled as art, is up to 90% a medium of (manipulated by all)

representation. Yet the figural, basic constant does not build bridges for the deliberate skewing of the

phenomenon; the chemistry, the process of becoming an image constructs the transitions to Schattauer's

modus operandi.

The photograph in the developing bath, the chem- istry, in case of doubt even the paper image, par- tially

create the affinity. Additionally, in spite of the colouring in Schattauer's images, when looked at from the

perspective of an over-used colour film, she makes rather black and white images whose austere nuances

produce their own, thor- oughly flagrant chroma, albeit in a primarily mono- chrome direction, i.e. in a

colour that could have come from a root. Occasionally Nora Schattauer places herself in fascinating

proximity to an opposing medium. In the Alfred Ehrhardt Stiftung (Berlin) in October, 2011, she put her

'optical centre' into practice. She showed 'Silbern' (Silver, catalogue), constructed states of nature and

blind drawings, in the environment of Alfred Ehrhardt (1901–1984), a universalist and photographer of

natural essentiality. There was never such elec- tive affinity. Are Nora Schattauer's images in the end

really more photographs that only look as

if they deal with drawing touched by painting?

Do snapshots in the literal sense take place?

See above. At this point, taking definitive wrong turnings must be temporarily suspended. Schattauer

makes what she must, the viewer looks and considers alongside.