Metamorphosis

Peter Nowotny, artist and engineer, is fascinated by Daphne: the woman who escaped a threatened rape by turning into a plant. What occupies him is not so much the crime – he is, after all, no lawyer – but the process of metamorphosis, of transformation. It is no coincidence that this catalogue of his latest works bears the double title “Brain Stomata”. These are the places, the organs, where communication and exchange between the outer and the inner world take place. One does not merely recognise oneself in the other – an age-old Romantic topos – one becomes the other, or the other becomes oneself. We are made of what we are not. This is called metabolism. One could also say “I is another” – in a somewhat broader, more physical sense than the one Rimbaud once had in mind.

Anyone who knows how much the Nobel Prize for Louise Glück delighted Nowotny, anyone who listens to him and learns how “nature writing” in all its forms has him under its spell, anyone who takes seriously what he says – that he follows the trace laid out in all of this, and that his own work is changing as a result – will nonetheless be surprised on seeing Nowotny’s new works.

For Nowotny remains – fortunately! – Nowotny, and to put it a little pointedly, inner and outer nature, “substance”, matter, are blank spaces in his work. Or more radically still: their heightened, even more intense presence shows itself in their consistent absence. Just as he once learned from the Jewish and Islamic high cultures, the religions that forbid images, that one must not desecrate and trivialise God, that which matters most. Which is what one inevitably does when one makes the highest, the transcendent – that which, not by chance, withdraws from our gaze and even from our words – the object of our imagination. Hard as it may be, one has to renounce wanting to hold on to, or “merely” to fix in writing, what one longs for. That is why everything in Nowotny’s magnificent art is sign, reference. Abundance appears by erasing what is superfluous. “To become empty of all that is empty” is how Meister Eckhart put it – the immensely influential mystic to whom we also owe words such as “wirklich” and “Wirklichkeit” (real, reality), long since taken for granted.

Peter Nowotny is a master of metamorphosis: of the permanent transformation without which our world would not exist. Whoever wants to possess everything inevitably becomes poor; whoever only ever sees himself becomes violent. Theodor W. Adorno, who saw in nature and art a last refuge in the administered world, recognised in love the ability to perceive the similar in the dissimilar. “Home” is only where everything is different – and may remain different.