Thoughts Beyond Words

“Finally painting that thinks,” Samuel Beckett said in view of Bram van Velde's works. I feel this way looking at Christina Lissmann's paintings, which she calls “Pearls & Bones”. Exactly that and everything else is clearly visible here, speaking for itself, without illustration, without illusion. Despite the obviousness of their allusions, the lines and forms remain autonomous, reveal themselves as such, undermining the references they suggest and thus remain intangible. They keep their secret, but without withdrawing into superficial non-figurations. On the contrary, they offer an amazing variety of things to see:

Self-enlightening deep-sea thought flows, neurolinks, synapse constellations, insights and their interruptions, ambiguities, aporias and other figures of thought, Sa Gojos and other Manga beings, archetypes, prototypes and other structures, secret gardens, micro-macro- and other worlds, insights, overviews and different looks, solitudes, seductions, liberations and other moods, voices beyond words - visual poems touching the unspeakable.

With words you only tell yourself. Christina Lissmann's paintings are turned towards the “other”, following the advice of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who replied to Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous dictum - “What one cannot talk about, one must be silent about” - with the words: "What one cannot talk about, one should write a poem about".

But look for (maybe not only) yourself.

Wilfried Dickhoff

Berlin, December 29, 2021