The exercise Print

Paint. In the beginning, for Hjalmar Leander Weiss, was paint. Paint is not wooed by the artist’s brush. No, it is trapped and held in its own being, broken down to its own pigment and laid bare through self-willed processes. Painting through motion; motion with paint. Paint as the medium. The artist has mastery over the paint; and out of it and with it constructs, like a musical chord building up out of the given: a new creation. What is produced: pictures with no objects. They do not portray anything; they remain nameless; they refer only to themselves. They are pictorial fugues, sustained by chromatic combinations and inner explorations. Simultaneous apparitions of near-endless richness and a wealth of nuances. They demand that there be time to stand and stare, demand patience and a distancing away from entrenched modes of seeing and handed-down parameters of imagination. Being looked at, they demand a kind of inner accommodatingness and something resembling humility. And what this word means here is: not to be someone who already knows everything but to have a preparedness to be open in the act of seeing and take pleasure in an expansion of personal horizons. Paintings like these have to be visually seized; let them come alive in tune with the beat of your own heart; let colours evoke personal thoughts, go happily strolling through a world of associations. Just as though seeing were talking. HEINZ NEIDEL