20/10/2024
EURASIAN VISUAL WORLDS
When Herbert SAX Baerlocher, born in Lucerne in 1943 and raised in Basel, moved to Japan in 1973, he had classical modernism in his luggage as a kind of cultural heritage from his youthful days in his grandmother's art shop and from his studies of art history and literature at the universities of Bern and Florence: Wassily Kandinsky, of course, Robert Delaunay and Hans Arp, the beginnings of modernism and the early manifestations of abstraction. And he knew the associated philosophies, which - for all their intellectual depth - were so much different from those of the Far East. Now, when SAX entered the school of Zen Buddhism, he had to throw this knowledge overboard and start all over again - not to negate his own roots, but to open himself up to a different way of thinking and to mature through new experiences, new perspectives and new ways of life.
SAX had already been active as an artist since his time in Berlin. After performing with various theater and music groups, he settled there in 1971 and began to make drawings with which he sought an inner access to himself, initially figuratively bound, but soon overplaying into the abstract. In the process, SAX discovered the philosophy of the Far East for himself. His interest in these wisdom teachings went so far that he decided to move to Kyoto to study them there. SAX stayed in Japan for 27 years. During this time, he studied under Hiromoto Susumu Sensei (1897-1991), who introduced him to the working methods and creative techniques of Zen Buddhist ink painting.
Characteristic of Japanese ink painting and Zen painting are, among other things, the motivic and creative simplicity of the pictorial whole, impulsive brush-rhythmic spontaneity, compositional-aesthetic asymmetry and the deliberate leaving of untreated empty areas. The white of the paper contributes decisively to the concentration on what is depicted, which is often reduced to the simplest forms in plain black and white.
Unlike Western abstraction, which seeks new manifestations of the creative through rational, logically thought-out simplification, Zen painting sees itself as a meditative exercise and as the visible product of self-restraint and contemplation. In doing so, the ink painter prefers to withdraw into a secluded room, with nothing but a few bamboo brushes, black ink and white sheets of paper within reach. In meditative contemplation, he begins to concentrate entirely on himself and the subject of his painting. He frees himself from all worldly references to this world and becomes inwardly "empty" in order to pe*****te to his deepest levels of being, which are beyond rational grasp. A Zen painter creates his works entirely from within himself instead of from visible reality: from his inner energetic currents, which he explores meditatively within himself. The prerequisite for the creation of a Zen painting is the harmony of body, mind and soul. Only at the end of this exercise, which is geared towards self-determination, self-reflection and self-awareness, does the painter finally take up the brush and, within a very short space of time, brings to paper with firm and definite strokes what he has previously anticipated in terms of motif, design and rhythm of movement in a state of contemplation. In this sense, Zen painting proves to be a visualized transformation of the deep layers of the self.
Herbert SAX Baerlocher proceeds in much the same way when he creates his black and white ink paintings. The works, which are mostly executed on paper, are created in a state of inner harmony and exhibit very similar stylistic characteristics to those of abstract Japanese ink painting: simple forms freed from representational contexts of meaning, quickly applied to the picture surface, with asymmetrical composition and a lot of white paper, whose empty spaces concentrate the viewer's gaze on the rhythmically executed brush movements. SAX's ink paintings are not depictions of motifs from visible reality, but the creative transformation of the artist's energetic states.
They represent nothing other than what they are: movements painted with black or gray ink on a white background, which at the moment of their creation, as a seismographic discharge of the artist's inner states, have a creative character of their own. The dichotomy of yin and yang plays a role here, the balance of the opposites of black and white, of flowing and static, of liquid and dry, etc. - all of this is brought into harmony in a level-headed and unpretentious compositional aesthetic, so that in the end a harmonious whole is created.
This is what Herbert SAX Baerlocher learned from his teachers in Japan: to free himself inwardly from the lowlands of everyday life in the real world, to let go, to immerse himself in the hidden depths of the ego in order to find his own essence and the essence of the things around us in this mentally purified state: the people who surround us, the living beings we encounter, the objects we deal with and the circumstances that accompany our lives.
Towards the end of the 1970s, SAX, mindful of his cultural roots and the early European forms of abstraction, mindful of the writings of Kandinsky and other theorists on the spiritual in art, and influenced by Japanese ink painting, found his way to painting in oil on canvas during his stay in Japan. Despite their often geometrically structured compositions, the paintings, executed partly with a brush and partly with a palette knife in bold colors, only seem to stand in contrast to his softly flowing, black and white ink paintings. On closer inspection, we also encounter some characteristic features of Zen painting here: the avoidance of symmetrical compositions, a brisk yet stringent brushwork and the restriction to simple forms, which are now, however, brought to the canvas in radiant colors with powerful contrasts. The consistently abstract formations with their circles, triangles and squares, with their fields of color sometimes rendered as broad rectangles, sometimes curved, sometimes take on anthropomorphic structures: There is an energetic center that we perceive as a kind of head, underneath a torso with arms and legs, sometimes with wing-like wings. Without actually thinking of human bodies while painting, such figurative associations arise almost automatically for SAX. The individual pictorial elements develop a dialogical interaction and, at the end of the painting process, come together to form a balanced, formally coherent whole.
The artist's working method is interesting, as SAX does not prepare his paintings in advance: There are no preliminary drawings or conceptual designs, nor does he work in series in which one painting emerges as a systematic development from another; instead, SAX creates his paintings intuitively, like a Zen painter, guided by the moods of the moment. Wherever possible, he does this in one go, without interruption. In this sense, the artist's oil paintings are painting "alla prima" par excellence. It is a pure, open and unspent language of expression that SAX seeks, brought to light in a state of contemplative relaxation as solitary individual pieces from the innermost depths of the self, without academic frills and without superficial show effects. The end result is an expressive painting that is geometrically structured but never constructed with rulers and compasses, painted in flat areas but never really monochrome, but in numerous shades, modulations and semi-transparent overlapping layers on the canvas, carried by the impetus of the spontaneous, the energetic and the lively. This is what makes Herbert SAX Baerlocher's works so authentic, what makes them so original, so unmistakable and so interesting for the viewer.
SAX returned from Japan at the end of the 1990s. He settled in Fextal in Switzerland, near Sils-Maria in the Engadine, then from 2013 in Weimar and since 2015 in Obernsees (near Bayreuth), and continued in all these places what he had begun in Japan: an expressive painting inspired by the spirit of Zen Buddhist ink painting and at the same time supported by the abstraction of the Western world, which finds its consistent stylistic development in the artist's black and white brush drawings as well as in his large-format paintings in oil on canvas. Asian and European manifestations come together synergistically in the works of Herbert SAX Baerlocher, where they develop their very own visual language. If there is such a thing as a "Eurasian canon", then it can be found characteristically in the ink and oil paintings of Herbert SAX Baerlocher.
Dr. Matthias Liebel, art historian, Bamberg 2019
Translated with (free version)
