Every artist sets up a body of work that forms, whether desired or not, a set of constants, variants, and breaks or ruptures. It is through these agglomerations that give access to an artist's 'language,' so to speak. And such a language is formed a posteriori — in that it is only after the event, or through repetition, do we start to build a sense of what such forms 'speak to' or what they address. Sibylle Baltzer is a painter who has focused on a certain repertoire of forms (not static but fluid — changing and repositioning) that point both inward, to the materiality of the process, and outward. In the case of the latter, this means that sometimes they are reminiscent of things seen: objects, landscapes, particular textures, or light. This duality I would see as a constant in her work; a tension that brings into being a set of forms that either want to dissolve back into the very processes that enabled them in the first place or alternately to 'represent' and reach outward — that is, to mark specificity and particularity in connection with the world, as experienced and seen. In this new set of paintings, Baltzer not only strengthens or accentuates this polarity but also finds new ways to move through them, to hold them together in a fragile poise. For her, painting is about materiality, in asserting its own objecthood, but can only be -really truly measured, perhaps paradoxically, in its responsiveness. And this might be seen to look in two directions: a responsiveness to the demands of the painting's autonomy and that of the filtered experience or record of vision; of being somewhere.
Previously, in the work produced in England, the paintings were marked with the rust, debris, and decaying industrial landscape of Southeast London. Since moving to Morocco, although certain formal similarities carry through, a very different sense of environment has had to be negotiated, and this is palpable in the current work. If we speak of a repertoire of forms, then these are, needless to say, multiple; that is, serving different needs in varying contexts. In this way, we can also speak of the picture plane becoming a form — either passive or active: accentuating movement across it or allowing an undulating sense of stasis situated upon it. The first sense is captured by examining a painting such as ('Untitled,' assemblage on wood, 30 x 30 cm, 2010) with its bold emblazoned calligraphy that fleetingly shifts across various layers of vertical bands. These forms appear to playfully work with entrances and exits, evoking a presence that exists between two screens. ('Untitled,' acrylic on canvas, 185 x 175 cm, 2010), on the other hand, becomes a cloud — delineated by a pictorial frame within a physical one. It is subtly held by a set of lines at the bottom of the picture, rather like a low horizon line accentuating this sense of almost pure phenomena above it. Other paintings possess this insistence on the fluidity of paint as phenomena.
David Ryan
