Konstanze Sailer

COUNTENANCE


What painting offers, always precedes the text, it constantly remains ahead of any speech-act and thus never falls behind the text. This precedence of the painted countenance and its traces forces the interpretation to two possible ways of reading, two readings which are equal to one another. The first interpretation perceives the face as a portrayal, it is what it represents; a painting whose depicting elements tend more towards its meaning than its indication. The second interpretation, equal to the first one, corresponds with the representation, within which the countenance indicates, trail-like without signifying in the traditional sense.

The portraits of Konstanze Sailer emphasise that countenances had once been present, faces of the past in which the sublimity of mourning, pride and pain fall into one another. The lust of past generations is reflected in the countenance and becomes a trace again that reminds us how everything that once was, is now only an unchangeable past. The portraits presented in this catalogue, with their rhythms, lines and rows, are archaeological fragments. They lay trails to the passed-by and keep the beholder within the traces of a temporal order. The facial expression as a trace...