Resistance of the present

The immediate actuality of an event, an action transferred from the state of possibility into that of reality, actually represents for the reflecting perception an excessive demand without exception. The really puzzling condition of the presentness lets our consciousness inescapably reach into the void. To establish a tangible distance to the immediate present is almost impossible. An autonomous inner core of the present refuses to be controlled by the perceptive faculty. The visualized of the present could manipulatively produce an alienated present, which might even be able to diminish the power of its as yet untouched aliveness.

The body is always present in the here and now. Even if it is able to change the place, to leave the house, to cross the street, in short, to indulge in the illusion of freedom while moving, it does not change the fact of its bondage to itself. And even the perception of this bondage is not neutral and therefore not always painless, when the reflecting consciousness understands its hopeless situation to exist in and with the body. The body forces the temporal and spatial weightlessness of the spirit anew back into its starting position of the presentness. Figuratively speaking, it would be the point of inertia or rest from which the restless consciousness seeks to move away again. This body fixed to the present cannot be as naughty as the mind and get out of it by a projection. The body must remain, it must remain in the present.

Lines, visible, comprehensible, legible lines still convey over long periods of time an unmistakable and affecting presence of themselves and consequently – sometimes more shadowy, sometimes more concrete – also an idea of the person standing behind them. In the immediately drawn, even more in the “accidentally” incomplete stroke, in the still perceptible pressure of the pen on the paper, an attentive observer once again becomes aware of the resurgence of the performer. Time seems to have stopped at this point, and it is not what is depicted that is real now, but the depiction. Everything past was once present, and it is also true that it is still present. It contains a reference that is not only a reference of the past to the present, but also, oppositely, a communication of the actual present to a world in which the past is simultaneous with the present. The picture as a simultaneous temporal as well as spatial structure serves the personality as a stamp, which documents the present imprint of its immediate existence.

A stroke is there immediately, one cannot make it, one is supposed to accept it out of one’s own rhythm.
It is a form of unconditional engagement and sustained expenditure with the aim of throwing analytically controlling, possessive thinking off track. Inspired by life without rules, which acts without any apparent reason, without calculated security, without any justifying pretext: simply to witness the power of the moment in its change.

Karl Schleinkofer, (catalog text 2015)