Angelika Biller

Across fairly spacious canvases Angelika Biller’s proto-paintings give the medium of watercolour free range: it inhabits its element, with delight. Temporally they seem to inhabit a single but diverse instant: the multiplicity of the moment comes through. In French auteur Claire Denis’ film High Life, set on a spaceship, there are sublime shots of the crab nebula and other deep space wonders draped across the void, placenta-like. Similarly, your eyes really feel Angelika’s painting. 

The boundary is of pre-eminent interest: the painter traces the motion of beginning and ending in the mark-making. She shows the spectrum of opacity; the paint takes on the effect of being lit from within; colour appears to be the source of light. The hues are intense in these works: they constitute a real poetry of pigmentation. The German writer Goethe wrote in his Theory of Colours that “The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.” 

This realisation is given space in Angelika’s works, as is Goethe’s observation that “Colour itself is a degree of darkness.” Turning in and out toward each other, these colours spin on an axis. The painter has managed to erase her presence to a skillful degree, as if these watercolours are coming into existence through an inexplicable logic of their own.