Emil Schumacher
Elam I, 1981

Artist
Emil Schumacher

Title
Elam I

Year of creation
1981

Technique and dimensions
oil on wood, 124.5 x 170 cm

Year of acquisition
1985

Inscribed bottom right: Schumacher / 81

An antithetical composition with two halves. On one side, burning hot desert sand, yellow and ocher playing into the burnt sienna. Black contours are thrown onto the surface like cracked lassos, with an azure blue spot shining in the middle, longingly suggesting the distance. A “window” set in the outline of a house or tent. On the other side, the blackness of filled bitumen grows towards ash, suppressing the glow. The matter between burning and burning. Line fights against surface, smoothness against color relief, the confrontation of light and darkness in all its severity. The non-color black in battle with the sick, poisonous yellow in the wooden tone of the painting plate, promising pain.

But such “symbolic” interpretation of images in the tradition of Expressionism is by no means Schumacher’s actual intention. His painting means “nothing”, but for him, created in the struggle with matter, it means everything. Schumacher's painting is no longer a "belle peinture" but "just" a colorful "picture" full of character and seriousness: "The viewer must help to form the picture. The picture is not a completed fact, but something, that constantly develops so that it helps us to make new discoveries. This is how a good picture is defined. It must always say something and reflect the intensity of its creation so that it continues to appeal to us later We, as recipients, benefit from it.”

For Emil Schumacher, the obsessive painting was always done with the heel of the hand and fingers, with the spatula and scraping the brush handle deep into the background of the picture: “Destruction is a primitive gesture of desperation and lust. The answer is not: to heal, but rather: to banish; not: to restore, but: to incorporate the act of destruction into the image - as an expression and as a form." (Emil Schumacher)

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