In the light of colour

I.

The title that the Cologne artist Uta Rings has given her overview of the work groups of the last few years can make you falter for a moment – and that’s what it’s meant to do, after all, it’s supposed to get you thinking right away. „In the light of colour“… Since light is the cause for the appearance of colour, one would rather assume that the construction of the phrase would have to be the other way around: „The colours of light“ for example, or, to use Goethe’s famous formulation: colours as the „deeds and suffering of light“. But of course the title, as it stands, has a precise meaning for dealing with the works of Uta Rings. She draws our attention to the light that is stored in the colours of her works, that shines out of them, to the pictorial light that manifests itself in the colours – or to the colours of her glass works, for example, which decisively modify the light that penetrates them. The title can also be understood as a metaphor: it asks you to look at the works in the light of colour, to take into consideration that the focus is on colour – „colour“ of course always meant in the plural as the variety of colours.

One can therefore definitely characterize Rings‘ work as „colour painting“. The name is correct, but remains very vague and calls for further clarification. In the following it will be shown that important aspects of her specific conception of painting are amplified by dealing with central positions and questions of artistic modernity. One crucial point should be emphasized in advance: the connection between art and life. Uta Rings is not concerned with painting that is self-referential, completely related to the inner painterly discourse, not with painting that only reflects on the fundamental parameters of painting itself. In her opinion, such basic meta-painterly research would miss an important point: art should have a place in life, a connection to everyday life. That’s why she doesn’t see her art as being detached from the existential aspects of life, such as living and working. Art is therefore part of life and should not claim exclusive status. It is directly in relation to this attitude that Uta Rings repeatedly deals with formats beyond the classic panel painting, with space-related painted friezes, room installations, works on glass or pictures made with wax crayons on paper. She also used the time of seclusion and uncertainty in the critical phase of the Corona pandemic to conceive a film trilogy called „Rollwerk“, the first part of which has already been realized.

II.

Her position in life is most evident in the friezes, of which there are two types in Uta Rings‚ oeuvre: the canvas friezes, in which long, narrow canvases painted with oil paint are assembled into a „stripe“ running around the walls, and wall friezes, which are painted directly onto the wall surfaces with acrylic paint. The friezes placed just below the ceiling of a kitchen or workroom, for example, remain physically outside the zone of everyday activities, they are usually only seen out of the corner of the eye or at the edge of the field of vision, but they still have a constant effect on the atmosphere and the sense of self of the people in the room. From time to time, during breaks in work or moments of contemplation, the friezes offer the eyes a stopping point while following their course and the change of colour.

The desire to connect the fine arts with everyday life is a typical motif of various avant-garde movements, especially in the years after the First World War. You can find it in the Bauhaus, among the Russian Constructivists and also in the Dutch movement De Stijl, whose ideas Uta Rings feels particularly attached to. Based on these ideas, she has repeatedly implemented artistic concepts that were specifically tailored to the real spatial situation in the rooms of buyers of her work. For her, the famous art buyer who chooses a painting based on whether it matches the sofa is not a subject for derisive comments, but someone who has a legitimate concern for art to be integrated into their everyday life in a pleasant way. The fact that she takes this concern seriously and designs certain works for specific living and working situations is not a loss of her artistic autonomy, but a contribution to the integration of art into everyday life.

III.

What is striking about the friezes by Uta Rings is that they always work with the parallel arrangement of two or three coloured stripes. Colour contrasts are her primary motif. In „Fries I“ from 1998, the narrower border stripes are each kept in an unmixed tube colour, while the wider inner stripe shows a carefully mixed modulation of this basic colour. If you look closely, you will also see underpaintings in different shades, irregularities in the application of paint, and unpainted areas that leave the gray canvas bare. Therefore the friezes are not merely colour-filled formal schemes, but living paintings.

The tricky points with every frieze are the corners of the walls. There, the running direction changes by 90 degrees. In the case of the canvas friezes, the individual elements meet in the corners. Uta Rings came up with an extremely elegant solution to the corner conflict in her „Wall Painting I“ for a kitchen. Here, too, the broad horizontal stripes of colour are bordered by narrow edge stripes in a contrasting shade. In the corners of the room, the main colour always encroaches a little to the right into the respective new colour of the next wall, while the associated narrow stripes begin a little to the left of the corner. In this way there is an interlocking of the changing colours at the corners, evoking the idea of movement going clockwise along all the walls of the room. This dynamic principle is of great importance; it points to a quality that can be observed in various forms in Uta Rings‘ work: her sense of rhythm.

This can be illustrated by her four-part „Installation with four coloured angles“, which she presented in 2003 at the Verein für aktuelle Kunst in Oberhausen. Each of the four angles consists of a horizontally extended, wider canvas, each with a high-contrast pair of colours (yellow/light red, blue/pink, orange/green, red/yellow), which is then, at the end, led perpendicularly to the ground at an angle of 90 degrees in somewhat narrower strips. The second and fourth angles start a little higher than the other two, so that, despite the minimalism of the formal solution, a quite complex rhythmic course of movement emerges. The eye is guided from left to right, with the movement repeatedly plunging down abruptly. The difference in height of the horizontal elements results in a further, more subtle up and down sense of motion, the uniformity of which is differentiated by the pairs of coloured contrasts that change from angle to angle.

IV.

With the rhythm, an important element in Uta Rings‘ work comes up for discussion, which as such was also extensively addressed by abstract avant-garde art after the First World War, including De Stijl. Just think of Theo van Doesburg’s abstract composition „Rhythm of a Russian Dance“ from 1918 or Piet Mondrian’s „Boogie-Woogie“ paintings of the early 1940s. Artists such as Paul Klee, Sophie Täuber-Arp and Robert Delaunay also included rhythm in their pictures.

Uta Rings took a closer look at Delaunay’s work, which is not surprising given the central importance of light and colour in his paintings. In his text “Ueber das Licht” published in 1913 and translated by Paul Klee, Delaunay wrote: “Nature is permeated by a rythm [sic!] that cannot be restricted in its diversity. Art imitates it in this respect, in order (…) to rise to visions of multiple harmony, a harmony of colours that divide and then come together again to form a whole in the same action.” In the work of Uta Rings one can find a connection to recognizing these basic ideas: the dividing and connecting of colours in a rhythmic context can already be observed in the friezes. Its dynamics become immediately clear in the first part of the film trilogy „Rollwerk“, which is titled „Lineas“. The film, which retains the charm of the hand-made and improvised, pays homage as an abstract game with light, colour and movement to the first experimental films of the Bauhaus, which were made a good 100 years earlier. Even if Uta Rings works with filmic means here, “Rollwerk” is an explication of topics that she also pursues in painting. In the medium of film, her basic painterly themes become vivid in a different way.

Rings works here with extremely simple means, with coloured transparent paper and a square grid made of black cardboard with 24 by 24 openings (cut by hand and therefore intentionally irregular), which gives the events in the film a constant form. In the opening and closing credits of the film, the words made of coloured paper mounted on black cardboard are guided downwards over a roller – hence the title „Rollwerk“ [Reel Work] – which sometimes gets visibly stuck and thus causes syncopations in the sequence of movement. The film works with static colour arrangements that alternate through hard cuts. The actual movement is created by a rhythmic flashing of light in front of and behind the paper, which changes the colour significantly, and different colour values sometimes merge with each other because of the overexposure or are modified by a sliver of light scurrying from left to right, from top to bottom. The result is a dynamic, polyrhythmic, syncopic complex event that consists of nothing other than colour, form and light – and of the eponymous „Lineas“, meaning the linear, band-shaped elements that are the subject of this first part of the trilogy.

V.

The film, which lasts less than three minutes and can be viewed on the artist’s Instagram page, offers a good insight into the main issues that concern her. Viewed on a laptop or smartphone, the film is the smallest work documented in this catalogue in terms of surface area. It is noteworthy that by far the largest work, the large window installation that Uta Rings presented as part of her exhibition „Drei Lilien für die Damen aus Nidau“ [Three Lilies for the Ladies from Nidau] in the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen in 2010, essentially deals with the same central themes – with the crucial difference, of course, of the spatial reference. On two sides of the room, six acrylic glass panels painted on both sides were superimposed on a floor-to-ceiling window front measuring around 2.70 by 10 meters. Since the acrylic paint does not bond with the background and, when it dries, forms an irregular, transparent layer covered with drops of paint, spots and dots of different sizes on the surface, it spreads the incident light and thus creates a mild, diffuse colour atmosphere in the room. Behind the backlit panes one senses the structure of the window and the shadows cast by the world outside. Since the incidence and intensity of light change continually over the course of the day, the appearance of the window panes also changes constantly – if you like, you can regard this as an abstract film in slow motion. Flat screens, the smooth, backlit glass surfaces of smartphones, computers and televisions characterize today’s visual socialization of people to a large extent. In Rings‘ window installations, a reflection of this everyday aesthetic seems to have been implemented with completely analogue means.

VI.

The relationship between painting and real life can have a wide variety of starting points. For the wax crayon paintings that have been created since 2021, the inspiration springs from mundane bathroom items such as plastic hand mirrors and other mass-produced inexpensive objects that can be found in almost every household today. On closer inspection, it is amazing how aesthetically invested these objects are with their smooth, colourful surfaces and their functional form. The idiosyncratic round, shell-shaped or square forms that appear in Rings‘ wax paintings are copied from such everyday designs, but take on a life of their own in their oversized format. It is striking that they either exceed the picture formats or are pushed so close to the picture edges that the backgrounds have no room to develop. The most striking design element here is – once again – colour. The strong, sometimes almost garish shades – yellow, dark green, blue, pink – turn out to be extremely complex on closer inspection. One can understand how the colour material was repeatedly applied here with wax crayons in several layers until a thick, partly porous, but mostly shiny, greasy surface was formed. Here, colour has a decidedly material character, which is also indicated by the title of these sheets, “Cirages”, the French word for shoe polish.

VII.

Let’s think back to the early friezes from 1996 and 1998. According to the definition of an architectural dictionary, a frieze is „a horizontal, ribbon-like strip for structuring and decorating a wall surface.“ And let’s look at the title of the film trilogy „Rollwerk“. Scrollwork in art history is „a decorative ornament in which the ends of ribbons, tendrils or curves are rolled up like a snail. This form of design was very popular with baroque furniture at the end of the 17th century. “ Here we have two references to the wide range of the decorative and the ornamental. These are topics that are viewed with scepticism in modern and contemporary art. But there are prominent exceptions, such as Henri Matisse, who had a keen interest in ornamental forms and described the decorative as „something very precious in a work of art“. Uta Rings appreciates the art of Matisse very much, especially his late „Gouaches découpées“, which work with cut out coloured forms – certainly also because Matisse treads unusual paths in painting with them. Rings has at least a relaxed relationship to the topic of ornament and decoration – the decorative is also a bridge that connects art and life with each other. In her glass works, which also represent a rather unusual form of painting, dealing with ornamental motifs plays an important role in two respects.

On the one hand, there are ornamental forms that Uta Rings applies to the glass. The technique is demanding. In order for her to be able to apply colour with acrylic and coloured pencils in such a way that it adheres to the smooth material, she first has to roughen up the relevant areas with a diamond cutter. Uta Rings has experimented with various types of glass, including a window of a discarded old VW bus. Recently she has primarily used cast stained glass with irregular surfaces, so-called cathedral glass, which is sometimes additionally decorated with fine relief-like ornaments. Such types of glass, often in soft colours, green, yellow, blue, were particularly appreciated in the fifties and sixties and therefore have a certain retro character. The cosiness that inevitably attaches to this kind of glass is counteracted by the artist by breaking up the ornamental forms – circles, horizontal and vertical stripes, X-shapes, wavy lines and so on – by disturbing the symmetry of the pictorial elements and executing the shapes in an expressive, gestural style. Damaging the glass surface certainly harbours a certain degree of aggressiveness. For Uta Rings, the use of ornaments only becomes real painting through these measures.

The glass paintings are installed at a short distance in front of the wall, so that the light can penetrate them from the front and – as a reflection – from behind. They show their motifs in the light of colour. In the late evening, when the colours are fading, the smooth, untouched surface areas reflect the remaining light and let it sparkle mysteriously.

Peter Lodermeyer