Blinky Palermo

Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste; Munich, Kunstraum München, Blinky Palermo, June - November 1993, cat. no. 78, p. 64, illustrated in color

“Throughout his entire oeuvre, Palermo attached the utmost importance to the role of colour in art, and especially to the part which colour plays in the process of abstraction. The energies inherent in colour are harnessed in a whole diversity of ways; their opposites are put to the test optically and their combined strength is made visible.” (Klaus Schrenk, ‘Zum Künstlerischen Werk Von Palermo’ in Thordis Moeller, Ed., Palermo: Bilder und Objekte, Bonn 1995, Vol. 1, p. 33)

Blinky Palermo is an ‘artist’s artist’ whose inestimable contribution to the lexis and praxis of twentieth-century art has been revered by the international artistic community for decades. However the wider public is only just awakening to the significance of this major figurehead who in his tragically short career categorically redefined conventional notions of painting as a planar rectangular surface conveying an image. With the recent revival of painting, the extended parameters of the medium as practiced by many artists - both established and emerging - and the continuing fascination with the more archeological aspects of 1960s German art activity, this major work from 1965 feels fresher than ever.

With its exacting economy of visual resource and two-dimensional configuration of chromatic fields, Komposition Blau-Rot auf Weiß is an archetypal example of Palermo’s early interrogations of the traditional picture format, fitting squarely in the forefront of what was adventurous then and what remains so now. At the time of execution, Palermo was a student at the Düsseldorf Akademie where he studied under Gerhard Hoehme, K.O.Gotz and, most significantly, Joseph Beuys whose didactic tutoring and lively discussion extended the traditional limits of aesthetic perception. It was Joseph Beuys who so violently and publicly broke down the barriers to do with material, form, content and actions. One of the original Beuysritteren, or Knights of Beuys, it was at the Akademie that the artist, whose real name is Peter Heisterkamp, assumed his sobriquet Blinky Palermo, named after the American boxing promoter and mafioso who was then famous as Sonny Liston's trainer.  During those halcyon years in the libertarian atmosphere at the centre of the Düsseldorf art scene, Palermo was an early cohort of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, with whom he shared studios and engaged in ribald debate about the available prototypes of abstraction: on the one hand the semantic codes of Abstract Expressionism and on the other the reductive processes of Minimalism. The overbearing atmosphere at the Düsseldorf Akademie was of critical opposition to classic forms of art, witnessing the nascent phases of Performance and Pop Art. While there, Palermo also participated in the highly disruptive Fluxus movement alongside, among others, Henning Christiansen.

Despite the potency of this intoxicating atmosphere, Palermo’s young oeuvre holds an originality and integrity that was impervious to the artistic influences of his time. Palermo approached his work from a practical rather than theoretical basis, always working from his own experience. Due to his extremely reserved character, he distrusted all written statements and manifestos about his art and  he rarely committed his thoughts to writing or even verbal expression. Resolutely a trend-setter rather than a follower, Palermo did not base his work on any theoretical concept that might reflect the ideas imparted by Beuys, nor did he seek to relate the social situation that prevailed in those years, as was the wont of many of his peers. Rather he embraced the unconventional mode of teaching and, seeking his own, individualistic path, he set about unconventional ways of presenting an immediate visual idea without the interference of illusory space.

In Komposition Blau-Rot auf Weiß, Palermo’s artistic vision is so distilled that it is hard to achieve verbal equivalence: the combined interplay of geometric form and the forceful presence of local colours produce an aesthetic phenomenon whose subtlety can hardly be expressed through the medium of language. A systematic analysis would destroy the visual cohesion of form and colour, thereby depriving the work of that potential openness which can be realised only through the combined action of material form and spiritual effect. It is in this regard that Palermo’s oeuvre epitomises Beuys’ theory of the poetical idea, a theory which induces us to perceive the phenomenon of form and colour as a purely aesthetic concept. The physical presence of colour and the immaterial effect which it seems to create together permit the viewer to experience the often inexplicable character of art as a spiritual force. As Anne Ramier has stated: “Palermo’s ultimate achievement may be said to be his liberation of form and colour from subordination to a greater authorially arranged compositional whole or from association with representational imagery. In every phase of his career he proposed alternative methods by which, in effect, to redraw the line bewteen real and painted space.” (Anne Rorimer, ‘Blinky Palermo: Objects, Stofbilder, Wall Paintings’ in Exh. Cat. Barcelona, Museo d’Art Contemporani Blinky Palermo, 2002, p. 51)

This is beautifully emblematised in Komposition Blau-Rot auf Weiß, a work which more than any other needs to be seen in the flesh to be fully appreciated. This ethereal yet robustly painted canvas with its intuitively placed black rectangle and cooly reductivist vertical stripes approximates the distilled perfection of expression which is the cornerstone of his practice. This surprisingly complex canvas shows him experimenting with constructivist principles of order and belies the influence of Kasimir Malevich, whose brochure Die gegenstandlose Welt was republished in German in 1962. It is one of the principal ideas of modernism to achieve movement and spatiality on the picture plane merely by the use of colour and form whilst completely waiving centralised perspective. Here, the contrast between the light and dark colours, set off by a thin horizontal line of vibrant blue along the upper limit of the black rectangle, generates in the viewer’s perception an energy which divides the picture plane into foreground and background. At the same time, the strict geometry of the forms is deliberately disturbed by interventions of the artist’s hand which release kinetic energies that create a delicate, hovering equilibrium and engender the sensation of rhythm. This arrangement of different areas of colour creates a visual effect of spatiality which demonstrates how polar elements - light and dark, mobility and immobility, flatness and depth - interact to create a clearly determined visual effect. The composition acquires extraordinary presence, setting off an interplay of physically guided perception and immaterial sensation which calls into question the very methods of traditional canvas painting.