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.