Jürgen Raap

Uta Schotten

Portraits, Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, June 17 to August 6, 2000 

Only a full view of the face or prominent features, such as the mouth, allows for the identification of a person. Criminals wishing to escape unrecognized primarily hide their mouth and chin behind a cloth or scarf, or they use a stocking mask, which, though transparent, envelops the entire head so tightly that the face appears deformed.

Some, however, believe that merely concealing the eyes behind sunglasses makes later recognition more difficult. All these strategies of masquerade are based on the principle that the whole becomes unrecognizable as soon as even one significant part is withdrawn from the direct gaze of the counterpart. Uta Schotten takes this fact as a starting point for her series of painted self-portraits created in front of a mirror. She limits herself to small, cropped sections of the nose and eye area, thereby counteracting the art-historical genre of the portrait and its strict link to the illustration of individual identity.

As is well known, a portrait always depicts a specific person, not some typified, idealized facial schema like a cosmetic fashion image. Yet, through her choice of a specific fragmentary quality, Uta Schotten anonymizes the (own) face. The effect is ultimately the same as in a masquerade. Thus, the art-historical concept of the portrait is inverted into its exact opposite—as is its practical everyday use, for example, in forensic wanted posters or passport photos. Despite quasi-impressionistic blurring in the treatment of form and a corresponding brushwork, the parts of the face are rendered with considerable fidelity.

However, what is ultimately decisive for the cognitive content of the image is not the degree of accuracy or sharpness, but only the totality of what is shown. In other series, Uta Schotten has dissolved physiognomic-sculptural elements more strongly into planes of color, and here it becomes even more obvious how a painterly obscuring of the outer face inevitably signifies an obscuring of the expression of personal identity. In these other series, she draws upon photographic sources. On the one hand, these are snapshots of friends and acquaintances; translated into painting, color, and spatial relationships are altered and distorted, resulting in a new and distinct pictorial reality compared to the original. On the other hand, there are motifs from an old family album featuring people whom the artist knows only through stories. Schotten contrasts the now "historical" pictorial atmosphere — in which the subjects posed before the camera 70 or 80 years ago — with her contemporary painterly language. 

She hermeneutically immerses herself in the world of a generation that no longer exists, while simultaneously showing how she might have portrayed these people today if they had still been able to sit for her. In general, Schotten’s paintings also offer a recourse to how much photography and painting have emancipated themselves from one another over the past 100 years. Admittedly, it is only in the shop windows of suburban photo studios that the painterly aesthetics of the 19th century are still celebrated, when the studio owner displays samples of wedding couples against backgrounds of bloated drapery. Elsewhere, however, photography has long since taken over the original tasks of portrait painting, thus allowing the medium of the painted image a successive reduction and abstraction of form, leading even to pure monochrome. At the same time, photography — and not only since the avant-garde of the 1920s — has developed its own medium-specific aesthetic. This, in turn, posed both theoretical and practical challenges for painting. Thirty years ago, photorealistic painting imitated photography. The painted images were intended to look as if they had been photographed. Then, the next generation of artists began experimenting with photo canvases.

Now, with Uta Schotten (born 1972), a young generation of artists emerges and uninhibitedly uses medial images as a source of inspiration and a tool, yet primarily practices "painting as painting" (or — in a variation of a well-known phrase— peinture pour la peinture). In the anonymization of the self-portrait motifs described above, a critical distance from the art-historically inherited topoi and genres of painting simultaneously reveals itself: an emancipatory distance that is necessary for something truly new to emerge.

Jürgen Raap