A Serious Painter
Text by Liliana Rodrigues

Each painting shows very little. Characteristics of Viola Bittl´s work is an economy of meaning. By using a simple visual vocabulary made of forms such as lines, ovals, flat planes, her graphic traces contribute to maximize the painting as a field and as a presence.

These simple figures and their variants are then set against an almost monochromatic background. But to think of these paintings as being simplistic would be an erroneous idea. Professor Ammann notices how these paintings “are the consequence of all the layers and interventions”¹. There is an opacity to every painting, which works in two ways; we cannot see what lays beneath the image but we can sense the subtleness how it is built. Once the priming is completed the painting takes on the exploration of ideas of transparency versus opacity, tonality versus monochromatic, density versus emptiness, etc...

The resource to a limited number of elements, which is neither a synonym for banality nor repetition, expresses instead Viola Bittl’s wish to investigate the discipline of painting for what it is; a bi-dimensional surface in which something happens.
The flatness of these figure-based compositions is further revealed through a prevailing use of pastel colors, the elimination of light sources and consequent shadows, as well as the fusion between figure and ground. All these strategies display the painter's disinterest in three-dimensional space as a problem.
Viola Bittl is not interested in Renaissance linear perspective or in other alternative strategies to produce the illusion of three-dimensional space, such as shocking contrast of planes of color and strong use of contour. In fact, Viola Bittl seems to drop the problem of representing space in painting altogether.

Instead, she is more concerned with the relationship between figure and ground. Since the Renaissance the relationship between what is depicted as a main scene and its accompanying background obeys a hierarchical order, the background mostly remains a background. On opposite, in Viola Bittl's paintings figure and background share the same importance, they compete with equal strength for our attention and their traditional difference is thus abolished.

Viola Bittl's work is characterized by the use of fields of color, of a limited number of figures, and a preference for “quiet” colors – as opposed to neon colors. On this subject, Professor Ammann mentioned how discrete these paintings actually are and how easily we could fail to notice them.²

It has also been pointed out that Viola Bittl doesn't work in series. Every image is an unique piece, for sure part of a larger research, but completely independent from the painting that follows and the painting that precedes. Refusing derivation, Viola Bittl presents the viewer with abstract landscapes of simple figures, which are neither violent nor brutal. They are sites or fields for experimenting with certain ideas such as weight, balance, contrast, harmony, etc.

This focus on the ontology of Painting has an affiliation in the history of the medium of course, especially with the American tradition of painting. Viola Bittl is not interested in the emotionality associated with the expressionistic gesture or in materiality per se, her paintings relate more to the modernist tradition. They focus on optical qualities as an autonomous domain of the aesthetic experience and on formal self-reflexivity. They investigate issues related to the specificity of Painting. By focusing on formal qualities, its almost like Viola wishes with her practice to reinforce the autonomy of painting, to return it to a golden age.
Exhaling discipline and a certain melancholic mood, Viola's paintings are imbued with a certain sense of frugality, concentration and duty. Overall, we get the feeling how serious she is about painting, as if since their birth these paintings are both part of a tradition and memorable classics in their own right.

¹ - Jean-Christophe Ammann, Viola Bittl, Hundert Prozent, 1822-Forum der Frankfurter Sparkasse, Frankfurt am Main, 2012.
² - Idem, Ibidem.

[Text from the catalogue „eine/r aus siebzehn“ 2012, on the occasion of the exhibition at the Museum Wiesbaden]