Encountering reality with Gerlinde Zantis After a term as a visiting interne in the Department of Pathology at Dresden’s Friedrichstadter Hospital, I was eager not to lose the language skills that had been so effortfully acquired. Read in German ! , I told myself, and I subscribed to DIE ZEIT. For years thereafter, every week a vast indigestible lump of newsprint arrived in my mailbox. To read it all was too much. Forget politics, forget the economy : Lifestyle, books, music. With a dictionary and much trouble, I could manage those articles. Wrongly or rightly, I remember the pages of DIE ZEIT as vast savannas of un- illustrated and daunting text, and thus the work of Gerlinde Zantis stood out all the more : Weekly for a month late in 1993 the Feuilleton granted her space for, in black and white and the size of a sheet of typing paper, a drawing from the wharves of Hamburg's Blohm+Voss. Not the subjects, but instead their handling transfixed me : Such massings of black, such finely articulated subdivisions of negative-space white ! Never had I seen anything like her mastery of drawing not in, but into, abstraction. I couldn't imagine her works in their original formats, the sizes of bus-stop posters, and I had to see them “live". A letter of inquiry sent via the newspaper reached her. She replied – Thank you for your note. Sorry, my work is not represented in North America. -- And, likely joking – Would you like to be my agent there ? She enclosed a brochure issued to complement the Blohm+Voss exhibition, showing a fuller range of the images that had so struck me. I jumped at the chance. Sell me these three images, I replied – naming titles, and a sum – and send me a packet of brochures. I'll do what I can. An exchange of prisoners followed (the original-format drawings were unimaginably more impressive than had been the newspaper renderings ! ) and I set off for a conference in San Francisco with, in my baggage, a handful of those brochures. I re-dedicated an afternoon from lectures on cytology to gallery visits, dropping brochures onto receptionists' desks, explaining that I had no financial interest in Gerlinde Zantis' success – I wanted only to see her amazing talents more widely appreciated – and, to my delight, she became one of the “new artists” introduced to the clients of an old and respected gallery there that same year, when she and I finally met. The gallery owner wrote to Gerlinde – “You draw like an angel.” I could only, I can only agree. I have been since then, in a small way, a collector of her work and, in a larger and ever larger way, an enthusiast for her manner of seeing and of translating into images that she sees, and our acquaintance has deepened into friendship. Thus over nearly four decades I have had the chance to watch her as she photographs, sketches, and finally creates the immensely skilled work that she elects to offer the public. Or : How does she do it ? I can perhaps share with others who admire her artistry a few remarks on how her drawings arise. In my eyes, her “finished” images are miracles of mis-direction. They can be taken for hand-drawn copies of photographs, snapped almost randomly, excelling in their detail but otherwise of note principally for the abundance of that detail. But to me, they’re not copies ; far from it. They are versions of more than one photograph, first of all. Added to that, they are the product of deletion, of culling, of choice, and of curation. They are creations. They arise through elimination of the extraneous, through augmentation with elements drawn from many sources. Yes, what remains from original photographs, or from images never photographed ! , is luxurious in detail. But that is a ruse, a trick, to fool the viewer into accepting as real an altered and a heightened experience : The Zantis world is not the one around us. Consider the “industrial typologies” of Bernd and Hilla Becher, objects photographed when clouds prevented sun-cast shadows. The shadows were distractions, were non-essential to whatever it is to be a water-tower, an industrial elevator. In their images the Bechers gave their audience the platonic object. Perhaps Zantis’ early art-school years in anatomic illustration led her in the same direction ; writing as a physician, I can imagine that an opened abdomen, with its dabs and flecks of clotted blood and its irregularly packed sponges, was a distraction from the platonic idea of what made, for example, a Meckel diverticulum its irreducible self. Between drawing in charcoal (colour ! Un-serious, lurid, tawdry) and removing the bits of débris, she gave the viewer the essential of anatomy, without sun-cast shadows. But only perhaps . . . At any rate, leaving anatomy of the human body, Gerlinde Zantis progressed to the anatomy of ship-building, where I encountered her. She drew the ruined remnants of coal and steel production in northwestern Germany, she drew clouds as they drifted ; woods, fields, and roads as they unfolded themselves before her, ploughed land in snow ; she embarked upon work in colour, venturing to extract what might in that choice add to the truth of what she saw and sought to convey. With colleagues she explored the Ardèche, a limestone plateau in southeastern France carved and defined by absence : Absence of water, except in what, through disappearing underground, it had deserted, left behind. She chose to show us the effects of another, different elimination, that of water, one that made of fields and forests raw and dry near-desolations, conferring an enforced simplicity to be seen not only in the landscapes but also in the farmyards of those who strove to make their lives despite that absence. She has now turned to investigating what it is to be rich ; rich in water. This she has done with her usual fundamental honesty. For years she has in photographing climbed aboard the roof of her mini-van to exploit an unusual perspective. Now in France with her waterproof camera she wades into ponds and streams. She takes many photographs, from many vantages. On returning to the studio, she examines these photographic images in a process of selection, deletion, alteration -- in short, curation. This proceeds through preliminary sketches in which features of the images are variously deployed, striving for harmony and for depth. The eventual "final drawing" is the product of much thought. It incorporates elements from more than one photograph and even from sources outside her own photographs. It is, when offered as complete to friends of her efforts, a discovery of what lies behind those photographs and sources, an intensified and, yes, improved version thereof ; it is a version of the cart-road, of the riverbank, of the secret lives passed underwater not as they are but as they might have been, a version as what should in reality be. The richness of detail is no longer random, no longer extraneous. It is selected to contribute to the impression overall, to confer verisimilitude, to deceive. That is the singular achievement of Gerlinde Zantis, immensely skilled in misleading, an artist whose art consists principally in casting away – would you be a sculptor ? she might exclaim : Then remove from the block of stone everything that is not your statue ! – what her eye perceives as other than the core of the experience of seeing. Saint-Exupéry wrote famously – On ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. Zantis’ realism rescues from the clog and clutter of mere sight that which is essential, allowing our hearts to see it truly again. Zantis’ work is not realist. It is better than that. – A.S. Knisely, Körmend / Kirment (Hungary), 2024.V.12
