Binary Codes and Divine Proportions

One is reminded of the formal rigour of early medieval panel paintings. The horizontal row of figures, their bodiless presence on the surface, the gold ground – the colour of the medieval heaven – were defining elements of medieval painting. In Peter Nowotny’s work, mirroring, binary code and divine proportions form a strange, playful unity.

If it is true that the world of the new media is being “switched from subject to system, and from subject–object relations to the feedback loop of human and world” *), and if the world is a construct of “beautiful relations between point forms and numbers”, then this must also find an echo in contemporary art. And of course there are many approaches that open up the new media as instruments of artistic expression. Nor is there any shortage of attempts to question the traditional panel painting with the means of the new media. Peter Nowotny undertakes such attempts, too.

In recent years Peter Nowotny has mostly painted multi-part pictures in which groups of figures, outlined in grey with a line of constant width, appear on a gold ground. The figures, arranged strictly along the horizontal, are overlaid with a sparse pattern of broad coloured lines. The coloured lines enclose certain body shapes – chosen, it seems, more or less at random. Having released the figures from their photographic space, Peter Nowotny takes a second step: he digitises the image created on the canvas. On the computer he first erases whatever unambiguity the linearly enclosed groups of figures still have. Only the coloured patterns repeat. Yet it is never simple repetition, but variation, mirroring, rotation, distortion. It turns out that in this way he can generate a kind of alphabet, words and texts. He then transfers this text “written” on the computer onto a second and a third canvas.

Nowotny uses motifs from the world of media and fashion as his source. But although the pattern of broad lines clearly lets this advertising aesthetic show through, one is reminded of the formal rigour of early medieval panel paintings. These correspondences and correlations are not accidental. Nowotny deliberately quotes this tradition: the horizontal row of figures, their bodiless presence on the surface, the gold ground – the colour of the medieval heaven – were defining elements of medieval painting. In Nowotny’s work, binary code and divine proportions form a strange, playful unity.

Early medieval art was not interested in the individual and particular; it showed a de-individualised image of humanity. It depicted the standing, rank and position of the human being within a firmly ordered social and religious cosmos. The microcosm is part and replica of the universe. In this view the human body, too, is composed of the elements of the universe. Beauty, order, harmony, concord and dignity can be represented as numbers and geometric figures. The all-governing harmony is a divine proportion. Above and below, left and right describe good and evil, grace and damnation, the sacred past and the future of the Last Judgement. This coordinate system is entirely sufficient to represent a reality conceived as twofold: the accidental visible and the substantial invisible. There was thus no need to feign space in painting or to depict the visible world realistically – no truth was attributed to it. Early medieval painting was therefore a painting of symbols, allegories and parables pointing to a divine truth. And since the medieval painter could draw on a universal language, he disappeared behind the universal and was scarcely recognisable as an individual painter.

This is where Peter Nowotny begins. He too is not interested in the body, in individual appearance, but in structures, textures, signs. Yet he is just as little interested in “statements”, in an all-connecting ideology or the divine order of things. His effort is directed at developing a painterly language of gestures, attitudes and postures that moves as far away from the individual gesture, attitude or posture as the sign for “house” differs from the real house – the sign from what it signifies. That, after all, was also the stake of an important current of modernism.

As his starting material he uses, as mentioned, photographic sources. Photographs strongly suggest reality. And since the invention of photography, painting has largely given up competing with nature by painting “true to nature” and “from life”. Peter Nowotny transforms the photograph from its spatial illusion into the plane and so destroys what is “documentary” about it. What matters to him is to obtain outlines and structures of great purity through repeated distillation.

In recent years Peter Nowotny has been interested above all in fashion photography. For it de-individualises, emphasises form, and develops a sign language of social stratification. It does not care who wears the fashionable products. Today clothing no longer signals its wearer’s station, but their rank on an income scale that is open at the top. Behind the mask of a lifestyle, individuality is precisely what disappears. Design replaces being. Staging without drama replaces a life actually lived. Nowotny’s pictures do not comment on this condition; they try to decipher – and to write themselves – the script of mere posture, attitude and gesture. What emerges is not meaning or sense, but signs that correspond to a particular sound of spoken language. In linguistics one would say that phonemes are perceived. The pragmatic and semantic levels of language are missing. Yet the sound gains meaning. And so it is with forms and colours, too. They set off chains of association and point to things familiar in many senses.

What I find remarkable about Peter Nowotny’s approach is twofold. Peter Nowotny frees himself from the myth of artistic uniqueness and spontaneity, as it lives on, for example, in gestural painting. Instead he seeks out the source images, tries to rethink them, and in doing so arrives at ever more reduced forms and languages. The second essential element of Peter Nowotny’s painting lies in giving up illusionism. He carries the (merely feigned) three-dimensionality of photographic sources back into the plane. Digitising the painted picture and varying the structures found in it on the computer creates a strange tension between rigour and play.

The real unease these pictures provoke, however, is the suspicion made visible that the contemporary “divine proportion” is binary code – that the world could be a mere construct and the result of one great simulation.

*) Norbert Wolfgang Bolz, “Mensch-Maschine Synergetik unter neuen Medienbedingungen” (Human–machine synergetics under new media conditions), in Symptome II (1993), p. 34