Apropos Brigitte Witzer...

Brigitte Witzer’s large paintings appear like heady experiences: a citrus-yellow heart floats in the middle of yellow blossoms, a gleaming red patch surrounded by pink flowers is placed on  a bright iris-coloured background of gold, or – a last example – a massive green shape emerges from its silver surroundings, trailing little green  spots.

Perhaps poetic language does most justice to Brigitte Witzer’s art since it is essentially a poetry of colours that the artist creates with paint, an addition, association and collision of colour tones and qualities. In this way tension, peace and dynamism are born out of the colourful shapes when they encounter each other within the space of the picture. The result is the expression of an intensity, the concrete representation of something that remains both definite and indefinite. This sounds paradoxical but it actually becomes possible in Brigitte Witzer’s art and paintings. What manifests itself is something we yearn for because it is rare: beauty as an immediate experience of the living.

All this is the result of a working process – or rather a pragmatic-technical method of creating a picture, necessarily a spiritual creative process, of an imagining, of both an idea and an abstract concept. Together these, in a tight relationship,  determine Witzer’s artistry and thus the pictures she achieves. 

Such art grows out of a process of trial and aesthetic experiment, the continuous act of physical contact, deciding as well as grasping what it is that, in the act of painting, of creating pictures on the paper, has developed, come into being. The artist produces layers of colour in a controlled fashion, which however allows space for chance, pressing the paint with a palette knife again and again onto the surface of the paper until a kind of  pictorial ground or surface resonating with colour emerges. Upon this background she places the flower-like coloured forms – you could also call them her protagonists. Thus through countless strokes an original picture world comes alive, in which the yellow heart, the red blossom or those more undefined shapes which spring to life in her work, are at home.

All this, the development of an abstract picture space with its depths, as well as the placing of shapes, is staged and choreographed: her personal vitality in the form of intensity of expression plays an important role in the act of painting. Although none of this is magic, the result can work magically – emotions and spirit are addressed and aroused.

This is down to the colours and the way they interact, to the shapes and scale of the pictures, but most of all this magic is down to the inspiration of this painting, borne by Brigitte Witzer’s artistic courage, her gripping energy and the living experience that she sets down on paper and thus brings into the world.

Peter Funken, author and curator Berlin, June 2018