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The result is fascinating
Gerhard Gerkens*: Latest works of Win Labuda TOKYO ART EXPO 1990
He has made hundreds of drawings, in years of
work, circling and circumscribing his subject;
The Elemental Sign. Again and again he has
placed line against line, testing in miniature how
they react to each other. As lines they are quite
un-individual; no thickening lends them
character, ideally no break, no beginning, no
end. Instead, ever returning, they coil round
each other, circumscribing the empty surface
with a single taut bow. The quick, hard pencil
allows but hard traces. The geometric forms
resulting prevent emotionality. But the
combination nevertheless possesses a quiet
form of life; looking steadily, one form seems to
push itself in front of another, opening insights
and vistas. The play of lines on the flat surface
seems to aquire a third dimension. Or did these
forms start in three dimensions, to be projected
later an the flat?
It had to take so long to speak of it; when an
artist works like that it becomes obvious that
only in the final filtrate has he cut everything out
that stands in the way of the unadulterated form
- materiality, colour, the spontaneous and the
welcome accidental. Purifying and repurifying
the drawing of all dross finally leaves the Relief
as the only adequate form. In it, what a question
is left behind. Sculpture projected on the flat
and thus abstracted? Or preparation for the
three dimensional form? No, the Relief unites
the two, belongs to both forms of notation. At
one and the same time more than drawing and
less than sculpture, taking an essential from
both and transforming it.
The Reliefs are white. All modifications of colour
are the result of light and shade. They underline
the structures, dissolving them again however at
the same time. The clear lines of the precisely
arranged shapes in the flat wood Reliefs have a
darkness darker in the shadows than their actual
depth, at the same time retreating almost
completely back into the surface in full light. The
play of surfaces before and behind each other
becomes ambiduous; only on looking closer is
their secret pictorial language to be deciphered.
It appears paradoxical: the works seem easy,
even simple, readable at a glance - and then
again not. Just as the form, so too the content
appears seemingly simple, Sign-like forms,
reminding one of elemental signs, placed next to
and interlocking with each other, so that one
thinks at first they were discovered by accident
and then put together. But in truth there are
secret correspondences between the lines and
shapes, and what at first sight seemed so
straightforward is actually carefully weighed and
balanced. The lines in the Relief “Yong” only
appear to be parallel; millimeter for millimeter,
almost imperceptibly they diverge, thus arriving
at their tension.
Almost archly the eye is mislead. The large
vertical in the middle element of “Ada” is, when
one looks carefully, not one continuous line but
different edges of a surface, These elements have
the magic of signs which, whilst we cannot
decipher them, seem nevertheless familiar, as if
we'd met with them before and they spoke in a
language whose vocabulary we but needed to
learn. But yet the art works have no message,
and as far as we can make out, if we knew the
vocabulary they would still say no more than we
can already see, So; the readable and the secret
together, the familiar and the strange.
So, again, we must look carefully if we want to
understand these works and their intention. We
must asses a line, or the break in a sweeping
curve, just as carefully as we do the subtle
instability of the whole structure caused by a
shape which appears to float loose within it. One
must be equally aware of the questioning as of
the harmony and its real or apparent state of
being in question, One must trace the intended
abstraction, like the visual principle of repetition.
Not the repetition of the same, but the repetition
of variations. All the pieces of the Relief “Trine”
are the same, but they are all slightly shifted in
relation to each other, so that, each time, the
figures creating the Relief are the same and yet
not the same, but rather three individual
combinations of the same elements. One might
get the impression that this was all very clever -
ingenious, constructed; but the artist prevents
