Miguel Fernández-Cid:
Can a Thought Be Physical?
Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968), an artist who trained in Portugal and
Germany, became known at the beginning of the 1990s for her surprising
personal imaginary full of allusions to everyday objects and to a fantasy
world both artistic and literary. Unlike many of the Portuguese artists of her
generation who drew very specific lines of work for themselves, she decided
to combine elements from the two cultures that nourished her: fragment and
synthesis, landscape and walking, chaos and order. This choice led her to relate
to artists from preceding generations — Sigmar Polke, Thomas Schütte, Juan
Muñoz —, to become interested in seeking new forms of experiencing space,
infusing her works with narratives, fictions, echoes, words and sounds, or with
metamorphosis as a dimension, and to avoid the rigidity of sticking exclusively
to matters of form.
Starting out on a small scale and using a pared-down, dense treatment, her first
paintings, objects, collages, photographs and videos seduce, attract and provoke
like children’s tales that conceal thorny relationships and hidden passions. As
her body of works grew, it could be seen as a kind of landscape, an open, living
thing, in transformation. We perceive whispers, distant footfalls, impossible
conversations, echoes, germination and natural change. We sense the initial
ideas of walking, observation and comment, in the manner of Robert Walser
and Herberto Helder; the penetrating and probing gaze of Borges or Calvino; the
playing with concepts of Baudelaire, and the resulting imaginary peeking out of
which are the Grimm brothers, Lewis Carroll, medieval sagas, Tolkien, narratives
containing changing dimensions, a transferral between worlds and the guises of
reality and micro-narratives. Discussions in which stories are traced, the tale is
guided along, the process is revealed but not rated or judged. Free of nostalgia,
with an unwaveringly contemporary commitment.
Due to this setting and to championing the studio as a place where materials can
reclaim their memory and set up relationships, thoughts are born that must be
expressed in images. The central idea is sculpture, and alongside it, seeking it, is
drawing like a reference. Nothing dominates, everything interweaves to define
surfaces, to inhabit the space — the paint is a gesture that suggests which way
to go but neither delimits nor specifies, not covering the medium; it plays with
being a fragment, a sketch, but never a final, finished image. Namely, the lines of
bamboo and their shadows, real drawings in the air or on the wall, which are also
a way to test the space, to approach it. The space as a notebook, a jotter in which
drawings are a sea mist, colour is a whirlwind, and the text is a sigh.
Everything is in contact and in transformation, awaiting the beholder’s
curiosity. The forms arise from organic matter, but they are born in the ground,
in nature. The figures are not fantasies or dreams, but rather imaginations:
they enter our world, we find out they were already here and may have been
watching us, consequently they bother us, they make us feel strange and send
us into another reality.
These images, objects and installations by Susanne S. D. Themlitz evade
certainty, suggesting a previous instant, an appearance or an escape. A world we
have stumbled across by accident, that we see from another dimension. It is not
magma that stretches out: it is a walk, a landscape, an interplay of glances, an
invitation to curiosity, a not being satisfied by the first image, a discovering of
micro-worlds, reflections, open windows, holes that open into other realities. An
ongoing, self-nourishing and unending narrative.
In contrast to artists who need white space, Susanne S. D. Themlitz deftly
navigates though impurities, she even seems to seek them out. When she was
pondering how her exhibition at MARCO should take shape, she wandered
through the museum’s galleries, inner corridors and storerooms, she took
the pulse (the mood even) of it all, as though it were a landscape that she
was going to inhabit, to make hers. She was searching for features she could
integrate into her project, bringing meaning to the dialogue, and avoiding
imposition. The result is installations one can explore and the recreation of the
archive, the studio and the storeroom to safeguard the artworks which, in their
conversations, announce the next, inviting us to decipher, like in Baudelaire’s
poem, “the language of flowers and silent things”.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz invites us to repeatedly ask ourselves what is hidden,
what is behind, concealed and prior: the conch shell as a memory of what it
contained, the outer cast of a bronze sculpture as an imprint and an object, the
magnifying glass that unveils a world hidden in the barely perceptible, the lines
that imply directions. It is not a question of reproducing reality but of acting in
it, of taking it as a landscape that can be modified. Something is on the verge
of happening before our eyes, as long as we keep them open. It is a question of
wanting to see.
The Language of Silent Things
It is difficult to decide which text should accompany Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s
images. On the table, I spread out catalogs, publications, cards, annotations,
photos, notes; I arrange them chronologically to inspect them. I don’t know if
it is purposeful, but some key aspects stand out clearly: words slim down, the
text turns into a conversation or becomes poetic, writing comes to the fore, the
fragment becomes prominent, the sentence foreseen, echoes, words up in the
air, while being incorporated mist-like into her oeuvres. And all this goes hand
in hand with playing with the scale of things in such a way that, at the time
when she was making small photomontages, the copies were larger than the
originals. Whereas, when it comes to including recent big installations, it is the
detail, the speck, that is sought, in the conviction it synthesizes the mystery,
and thus it occurs.
One suspects a solid reason for this: Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s oeuvre is never
static. The spectator walks around her, and everything — the walk, the
conversation, the landscape, the observation, the curiosity, the search — brings
up images, ways of saying, of specifying situations, of insinuating intentions.
Perhaps for that reason, the walker feels a propinquity, even a certain and
strange familiarity to a world whose echoes are recognized.
These propinquities are not, as often occurs with other artists, a fondness
for models, not even that kind of proximity some works can make you feel,
especially photographs, which we all think we could have snapped ourselves on
some occasion. Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s undertaking is the opposite: it seems
to incarnate the images in our dreams, in the memory of distant readings, in our
searches, in that world where desires and experiences intertwine and in which
our imaginary finds sustenance. How could we not feel that the crayon and
graphite works on paper, like the hypnotic Trans-Planas & Trans-Plantas (2011)
convey the interpretive daydreaming that led us to accept quite naturally this
fantasy reality? Perhaps this is the artist’s first accomplishment, convincing us
that everything she shows is real; it is her world. But it can also be ours, despite
our sensing its apparent instability, its delirium of encounters between materials
and objects, the fragility of the rescued elements, which she gives a new life. We
accept the surprise because one cannot avoid falling under the spell of painterly
seduction, but also, deep down, because it possesses an inner structure. This
structure sustains, it brings an equivocal world closer to reality and performs a
subtle balancing act that, in an almost imperceptible way, makes all the objects
interrelate and become infused with inherent and poetic meaning, like words
building a text.
Often, when contemplating an artist’s oeuvre, we ask ourselves where did they
make it, what is their work place like, what elements do they have nearby, if
some corners are set aside for certain activities, if they need a clean environment
in which to think about their projects, if they work on several ideas at the same
time, or if they need to focus on one. When we observe Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s
oeuvre, particularly in group exhibitions or small individual ones, the attraction
towards what is seen, towards the results, towards what is shown, goes hand
in hand with an interest, a need even, to know and see what came before, what
has been hidden. On those occasions, the dialogue that arises with the oeuvre
fills with questions. It is then that one wants to know how the artist would react
to their dream of having an ample space where they could spread out coming
true. In this manner, Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s exhibition, The Language of Silent
Things, was born in MARCO. Ezra Pound used to say that the greatest compliment
a book can receive is to say you are dying to read the next one. Having seen that
every time Susanne S. D. Themlitz exhibited, she demonstrated a strongly visual
side, but also touches of a more inner world, revealing the paths she could follow;
it seemed logical to ask her to let those touches take shape too, and when the
opportunity arose, to show the process, her ideas and her discourse.
Many artists are scrupulous, and they do not like to reveal their path, only
the finished piece. Occasionally, they see no worth in those previous phases;
but others feed from them, and need to keep them close or to know they are
there and that they can retrace their steps. Judging exclusively by what she has
exhibited and how she has displayed it, Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s profile would
be that of a living studio painter-artist. For an artist of this kind, everything
resembles a sort of material archive — images, stories, sequences, echoes — to
which they can come back, not to get ideas, but more to incorporate the memory
of the objects and of their work. Also reviewing solutions and observing with
heightened curiosity — a mix of eagerness, nervousness, and humor — until
they see the truth in something Pasolini said: that one only need shift their
vantage point a millimeter to see an entirely new and different world. An idea,
by the way, that Susanne S. D. Themlitz uses in her installations, which not only
possess the undeniable power of the overall image, but also demand to be looked
at with curiosity because there are always hidden nooks and crannies, alluring
objects and almost impossible encounters.
One cannot but regard the whole as a sort of a landscape inhabited by, or made
up of, several pieces, even those dating from different times, which may undergo
subtle transformations. The notion of the landscape as an image of the sublime in
the Hellenistic manner and, especially, its rediscovery by Renaissance, Baroque
and even German Romantic painters, is familiar to her. Susanne S. D. Themlitz
accepts it as a whole, but she breaks it, she dilutes it, she spreads it out across the
paper, when this is her chosen medium. She seeks a complicity with perspective,
with the rupture of linearity, and with her mode of substituting the ideas of
seen landscape for travelled landscape, and of physical image for mental image. It
is difficult to explain in words something that is so thrilling to perceive when
looking at the works: thought acquires shape, it materializes. And the figure,
almost vegetable but fiercely human, containing at the same time a face and its
double — once again Trans-Planas & Trans-Plantas. An image to comprehend —
revisit and update — Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Lewis Carroll… Not far removed from
Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s world, although, being worked out by art, hers reveals
other details.
In Susanne S. D. Themlitz everything is landscape, but everything is propinquity,
and passes through the touch of the fingers, which I imagine in direct connection
with thoughts. Accordingly, when she shows her workshop, populated with
sketches and work-related elements, but also with manual sculpting materials,
self-contained drawings and paintings stick out. And in them, she does not paint
finished landscapes but rather the annotations of her journey through them (Si…
el horizonte / Tres líneas, una esquina multiplicada por cuatro. Y un paisaje, [If… the
horizon / Three lines, one corner multiplied by four. And a landscape]) 2017).
Syntheses, traces, walks and views: relationships.
In The Language of Silent Things, Susanne S. D. Themlitz displays her oeuvre as it is:
a work in constant evolution, an oeuvre that feeds from itself, from her memory,
but also from the surroundings, admitting — even seeking — the contamination
of propinquity and aesthetic identity. She sets up a dialogue between materials
at the museum — glass display cabinets, leftover exhibitors and surplus
materials — and her works. Sculpture casts are turned into objects in their own
right, together with some that are found on her walks through the city, which
she rescues to explore the aesthetic values that attract her. Her way of looking
bestows meaning and unity upon the collection.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz modifies the space without imposing an external
language, she uses materials found in the vicinity, many of them in disuse,
and integrates them into her project. The idea gradually changes, defining
itself, and it does so quietly, almost silently, as if things were falling into place.
Some may think that she plays with luck, which she does, but if everything is
integrated, it is because there is a previous structure, a non-rigid order, that
allows it. Witnessing the transformation process of the spaces is like observing
a succession of surprises, of interlocking decisions, minimal in appearance but
always interconnected.
Transformatório (Laboratório de desenho) [Transformatory (Laboratory of
Drawing)], dated between 1986 and 2024, is a magnificent example. It can be
understood as what it announces: a transformation process of materials. With
the add-on that its layout allows us to assume this process is part of the blocks
towards synthesis, even if it is complex. But it is also a drawing laboratory, where
preparatory materials can be found, like measuring and analysis instruments,
models and depictions of production mechanisms. A drawing laboratory that
gathers everything necessary for its development, with a clear idea of the process.
However, once you have seen the whole collection, it is worth slowing down, to
get closer, to see and become aware that what seemed stationary is actually
moving. That the collection is alive. A series of lenses and little concave and
convex mirrors open up new microcosms for us, or they simulate the movement
of proximity or distance of some objects. The laboratory is active, in motion.
Reviewing this collection of works is the best way to understand Susanne S.
D. Themlitz’s attitude. She is always willing to give a new lease of life — a new
meaning — to the materials, indeed, she is committed to finding it and to
providing the viewer with clues so they can follow her endeavor. The eye moves
from objects in balance to accepting the paradox of another whose function
has been modified, dignifying it, and thus turned into an essential piece of an
impassioned succession of directions and surprises. The appearance of everyday
objects, the alternation between the opaque and the translucent, and the
inclusion of fragments from objects that have lost their original function and
have become essential pieces of a world in turmoil, invite us to discover and to
think artistically.
Susanne S. D. Themlitz insists on the need to see, to “enter” her world and its
mechanisms, which is why she repeats the process in wall pieces such as Dentro.
Tal vez. [Inside. Perhaps.] (2018 & 2022), in which she reiterates the importance
of staying alert, of not settling for the first image, of accepting that everything
is changing and that nothing is opaque, that any object can contain/unfold
another world. Inside. Perhaps, she tells us, maybe hinting that discovery depends
on the viewer’s attitude.
On the tables: ceramics, glass spheres and jars, mirrors and — rescued or
manipulated — objects in an evocative combination of balance, fragments,
and colors. The eye enjoys selecting motifs, in a collection possessed of an
inner order. And on the walls, paintings reminding us we are facing a landscape,
announce: Le Loir est rendormi / Another Moment [The Dormouse has fallen asleep
again / Another Moment] (2015) or Si…el horizonte (Tres líneas, una esquina
multiplicada por cuatro. Y un paisaje), from 2015. Or, in a space of its own, the
subtle encounter between a spectacular Monet-like painting, Reflexo do lugar
ao lado [Reflection of the place nearby ] (2021), and two terracotta pieces, Ás
pálpebras ás de bolboreta [The eyelids of the little eye] and Una migaja, silencio y
una palabra olvidada [A crumb, silence, and a forgotten word] both from 2023.
Which only goes to show that subtle and precise works can emerge from a
maelstrom of ideas, regardless of their scale.
El silencio de al lado (Entre seres y paisagen) [Silence nearby (Between beings
and landscape)], 2000 & 2024, is another kind of laboratory piece, a journey
following the emergence of images — drawings, intervened photographs,
collages — until their volume becomes defined, and the magic of seeing a
personal tribute to the dimension of sculpture, from minor details to words,
sounds, and echoes. The title is both descriptive and poetic — that feeling,
which recurs when seeing her work, is unavoidable; if we work in a magical
world, the description tends to be poetic —: El silencio de al lado (Entre seres
y paisaje). A mix of display cases — some of which appear to come from an
archaeological museum— and vitrines, contain and classify materials, notes,
documentation, and early sketches. Alongside them, figures — beings — and
landscapes, some inhabited by figures. Susanne S. D. Themlitz shows us the
preparatory space in which ideas take shape without noise or grand scale: in
silence and nearby.
If the drawing laboratory is a tribute to curiosity, to going behind the opaque, to
entering, to looking while searching, then in the sculpture laboratory we can see
how the image is already announced in the small photomontages. Fragments of
materials, displayed in vitrines, suggest both a defense of the tactile values and
the inherent possibilities of seriality: subtly colored cutouts which invariably
appear in Susanne S. D. Themlitz’s work; little sculptures in clay, plaster or
ceramic, the traces of her work left by her fingerprints, suggest the idea that
sculpture comes from a meeting of details, without artifice or external support,
a slow process of searching and approximation, conceived through the eye but
driven by the fingers. And in this collection, her characteristic beings, that seem
to come from the literary world of medieval legends or from Carroll’s imaginary,
engage in peculiar dialogues, coming out of the block, defining themselves.
Alongside them, on the walls, paintings and drawings of landscapes and figures,
whose intent is clearly to create dynamism by breaking unities of image and
time, with Entre el tiempo [Between Time] (2010), Parallel Landscape / In Search
of the Mirror Neurons (2008), or Trans Planas & Trans-Plantas (2011). The beings
emerge from the landscape, growing from underneath, rooted in the earth,
in nature, and the landscape opens up in different windows or unfolds as a
continuum across the surface, spreading like an unrestrained, liquid stain.
A special detail: on the label accompanying El silencio de al lado [Silence nearby],
the word words, in plural, is included alongside the other materials, because
words, sometimes verses or fragments of sentences, often pushed into the
background, almost faded, like echoes, are a kind of new dimension in sculpture,
though they run through and pop up in her entire oeuvre, reinforcing its sense of
being an invitation to stroll, discuss, have a conversation.
And a conversation, or many, is what unfolds in the courtyard it inhabits, from an
almost zen-like position, The Language of Silent Things. In one of the courtyards,
where prisoners of the jail that the MARCO used to be were let out in, Susanne S.
D. Themlitz’s enigmatic characters come together, figures that we imagine are
changing their clothing, like shedding their skin: Transplantado [Transplanted]
(2006), Intermedia, Entre [Between] or Discreto [Discreet], the latter made in
2024. The figures wear boots, loose clothes, perhaps the artist’s own or found
by her, and have disproportionately small heads, visibly marked by the traces
of gesture, by an artistically powerful device that heightens the sense — as
happens in many other works — of multiple interpretations. And just when
we think we have grasped the method, the surprise comes back: Elemento en
aluminio, probablemente desprendido de un dibujo en grafito y óleo, aún por realizar
[Element in aluminum, probably torn off from a drawing in graphite and oil,
yet to be made] (2010), an enigmatic figure and a title that betrays the artist’s
frequent ruptures of time and space.
Alongside the figures, there are more organic compositions, such as Alice (2010
& 2024), or abstract ones — product of the encounter between materials
in vertical balance. Some are solid, opaque, totemic (Neutrum, 2024), when
ceramics and wood are melded; others lean more towards mystery and dream
(Memoria suspendida [Suspended Memory], 2023), while introducing glass or
crystal, and appreciate reflections and let us see the inside. And, once again,
there are works that seem to follow their own path, restraining perhaps with
greater zeal their hidden sources of inspiration, such as Elemento en bronce,
probablemente desprendido de una pintura [Element in bronze, probably torn off
from a painting] (2010).
The word, integrated into sculpture as an additional dimension, but also sifted
into painting as a murmur, almost in the manner of a glaze. “A paisagem.
Sombras desenhadas. Um mapa na cabeça. Bolhas no cérebro. Lupas
introspetivas. A densidade. Longe” [“Landscape. Drawn shadows. A map in
the head. Bubbles in the brain. Introspective magnifying glasses. Density. Far
away”], “Musgo tinha-se pegado às pernas” [“Moss had clung to the legs”] can
be read written into a fascinating landscape, both liquid and aerial, with alluring
bursts of paint that hide the rest of the text, Flutuava [It fluctuated] (2020). It is
a method she continues to use as the painting gains dimension, the oil spreads
across the canvas, and the texts turn into barely perceptible strips — the word
fading and the painting transformed into a trace on the fabric with an inkling of
skin or, once again, of landscape.
The image breaks and multiplies in murals (Pared de Ámbar, [Amber Wall] 2013 &
2024), in which the imaginary is expanded, mixing scales, isolating forms, turning
everything into a landscape filled with islands, organic meteorites, alluring stains,
fleshy plasticity, inward gaze, explosion and a few interposed drawings.
Sculpture is expanded in Dentro. Suspenso [Inside. Suspense] (2024), inviting the
viewer to enter the work, to inhabit the shadow, as Penone would say. This is not a
sculpture of evidence and weight but of balance and lightness, of insinuation and
transparency. It is a sculpture that acts as a space in which Susanne S.D. Themlitz
can draw in the air, with shadows and arrange her motifs like buds, germination,
air painting, and introduces music by means of a subtle mechanism. The feeling
lingers of having been reading open-ended poetic prose, as opposed to a
finished poem.
Time after time a similar game: we are invited to enter the other side, to inhabit
fantasy in a way that is at the same time material, liquid and ethereal, with
shapes germinating or transforming themselves, in a world that feels close to us,
linked to our imaginary. And we admit, convinced, that words and ideas can beat
in the skin, and that thought is physical. Because we have proof.