Humans’ relationships with their spaces have always been a foundational concern in BEN WILLIKENS’s art. In 1969, when he was thirty years old, he fell severely ill and was confined to a clinic for almost a year. The experience of the anonymity and coldness of the hospital rooms left deep marks and became formative for the emerging artist’s oeuvre. The space as an allegory of human states of mind moved to the forefront of his artistic practice—a motif that came to define WILLIKENS’s work.
In the course of his long career, WILLIKENS has often been perceived as a painter of deserted spaces. Uniform and predominantly cool and austere surfaces, gentle gradients of muted colors, and static perspectives are characteristic visual features of his output. Yet as the artist affirms in his new body of work Archaeology of Silence, none of these spaces were ever empty or truly devoid of humans. The most recent paintings, which extend the series shown last year at Albertina Klosterneuburg, place the human being in his spatial environment at the center, a focus underscored by the personal structure of the gaze. In haunting close-up views executed in a new palette of blues and grays, WILLIKENS has created compositions with a photographic aura that force a fragmentary perspective. As though the artist had shattered reality and enlarged the broken pieces, it now affects us through the isolation of numerous details of the spaces as motifs in their own right. We enter the interiors of institutions of all sorts; the magnification of objects such as beds, lamps, electrical outlets, and washstands virtually dispels their original recognizability. Like a movable part of an interconnected structure in three dimensions, a picture now indicates a specific point of view, one unmistakably tinged with emotion; the body of work as a whole, meanwhile, frames an inexhaustible diversity of perspectives.
One vital source of inspiration for the works in the exhibition were Michel Foucault’s analyses of a social order operating between reason and madness—an investigation the French philosopher called an “archaeology of silence.” In Madness and Civilization (1961), he defines madness as not just an illness but a kind of “counter-reason” that is pushed to the margins of society and silenced. Traces of this dynamic, he argues, can be found above all in institutions such as prisons, mental asylums, dungeons, barracks, orphanages, and brothels. Foucault calls such places located beyond the bounds of normative society “espaces autres” (other spaces) or heterotopias. They accommodate antithetical ideas and expose social mechanisms by reflecting or negating them—either way asserting their otherness. WILLIKENS delves into these themes in his recent works, drawing on personal experiences as well as a steadily growing collection of images and scrutinizing the structures of such scenes as they present themselves in experience and recollection.
“My pictures are hybrids—lucid visions of reality, so lucid they are no longer reality.”
Rendering “psychodramatic dream spaces,” WILLIKENS says, the paintings articulate the interrelation between humans and spaces through the impression of a lingering gaze: “These are images seared into the retina, it is the final view, and no other view is forthcoming,” the painter explains. His formally reduced and ostensibly depopulated spaces are always tokens and emblems of human realities and dreams. The encoding of personal memories and institutional structures in spaces is closely bound up with the construction and experience of history, identity, and power. It is amid this tension that the paradoxical and fictional reality unfolds which the artist portrays: spaces that seem both hyper-perspicuous and otherworldly—so real they transcend the precarious status of reality.
Between (depicted) deserted unreality and the (spiritual) real presence of humans, the motifs unfurl a kaleidoscopic view of fundamental human spaces. In that sense, BEN WILLIKENS’s works are never without mankind. The human figure is absent from them, yet they are brought to life by their historical—and invariably human—past, their imaginative—and ineluctably human—present, and their possible—and potentially human—future.
INSTALLATION