Collected Perceptions
As a young artist in the nineteen-sixties it took a certain amount of self-confidence to dedicate yourself to figurative painting. Norbert Tadeusz did just that. Out of this grew an impressive painterly oeuvre, widely admired today. Tadeusz had a subject, an obsession, almost. It was the female body. He wanted to capture it, first as a sculptor, still in the class of Joseph Beuys, and from then on, as a painter. Female nudes provided him with the most diverse reasons for painting and set his deep painterly curiosity in motion more than any other subject; nudes remained an equivocal mystery to him, and thus an inexhaustible source in his struggle with form.
Tadeusz chose primarily large to very large formats for his paintings, works of sophisticated structure, with austere motifs oscillating between colour that is flat and colour that proliferates aggressively. In addition, he produced a set of works almost entirely in private, practically unnoticed by the public. While not deliberately trying to conceal these, he nonetheless carefully kept them to himself, and ultimately left them within the shelter of his studio for decades: small oils of intimate character, captivating in their intensity and directness. It is a kind of personal collection consisting of sketches and drafts of shapes, of preliminary deliberations and spontaneous transcripts, but invariably restrained and precise. These works have something casual, something unintentional, about their whole character. They are not pleasing. They show interiors imbued with the banality of the everyday. Female models are placed on carpets and sheets, between a radiator and a TV, posed on stools and shiny, black grand pianos. In his surrounding environment, in his studio, Tadeusz finds his visual sustenance. The artist never attempts to narrate. No agitation, no pathos. Tadeusz displays. His gaze forges subject-matter. With this gaze, he surprises us. Read More
He latches onto the unusual, exposes an un-sanitised, sensual reality full of melancholy, inhabited by goddesses of a very earthly kind. Tadeusz adheres to the tangible, the graspable. His attention is directed towards things, irrespective of whether they are nudes or ladders. Through energetic brushstrokes, he helps them achieve a sense of forceful presence. He tirelessly gleans stimuli from them that are wholly personal. And even before the subject arouses interest, viewers find themselves attracted to the sheer play between forms and colours, arranged in a legible way. Order and passion, an instinctual geometry shapes the architecture of his pictures. Peculiarity piques curiosity. Nudes and props melt into a strange symbiosis. A heightened sense of colour breaks through unmitigated contrasts, illuminating surfaces with delicate glazes or areas of tantalising garishness. Extreme angles, foreshortening and changing viewpoints keep the spatial structure in a fragile balance, as well as creating an obvious pull in terms of perspective, which, like the probe of a geologist, aims inside the body of the picture.
Representation in Tadeusz’s work remains vague and fragmentary. Created with a deconstructive energy, his works evade full comprehension when only given a cursory glance. They instigate a deft game of perception, a game in which each centre of attraction is simultaneously recognised as the fringe of the next, a game that encompasses figures and intervals alike. This game follows a net of contingent relations cast with ingenuity and which seeks its strongest form of expression in repetition, doubling and symmetry. Diagonals determine movement and speed. Those who follow Tadeusz’s sweeping gaze are met with unexpectedly fascinating pictures; in other words, they learn how the folded edge of a carpet can become an event.
Text by Dorothea Baumer, from: Norbert Tadeusz. Bilder 1964 – 2004, Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich
