Gardens of Paper

A picture can be photographed, painted, filmed, sculpted. For Thomas Reinhardt, a picture can also be cultivated. To be cultivated, a picture needs the gardener’s patience. Reinhardt, who is famous for his gardens, starts to collect paper without a specific and prearranged project for his collages. At the moment of collecting paper there is only a bare potentiality of a work.

In Reinhardt’s work, nothing comes as a unilateral planned act. The artist works in the middle of a making process that has already started. The beginning and the end of Reinhardt’s work can’t be predetermined. Even if his collages have a very distinctive style, they all have to be regarded as unique pieces that don’t have necessarily to be considered with the others. They can be seen independently as their titles underline, but also as parts of the same stylistic and spiritual path. It may help to imagine them together as an album that can be seen and read in sequence or randomly – as a book of sayings or a canzoniere of poems.

Reinhardt’s work deeply explores what intrinsically concerns the collage: the potentiality of fragments of forms to become new forms or revealed forms that were hidden in the materials and in the context where the paper was collected. In this process the technique of making is less important then the spiritual involvement of the artist. The meditating aspect of the collages also makes less important the direct observation than what could be called prophecy. Referring again to the titles, many of these works that cover forty years of the artist’s life are premonitions of historical events, interpretations of political and cultural issues.

To cultivate means to take care; but it also means to be exposed to randomness, to the unsure of results. The cultivation needs to balance the idea of the form and of the work in progress that makes, and at the same time unmakes forms. Considering Reinhardt’s process, one can say that he doesn’t only find ideas for his work, but lets ideas find his work. That is the moment in which his collages acquire a more explicit meaning. Yet, in this process the author doesn’t disappear. His authorship expresses itself in the attention (care, cultivation, observation) that constantly goes with the work.

In terms of style, the most important element of this simultaneous process of making and unmaking forms is the co-presence of the positive and the negative space of paper. In Reinhardt’s work positive and negative space melt and reveal that even what seems a clear dichotomy is in fact a complexity that integrates its apparently dispersed elements. The ability to combine such opposite items is one of the characteristics that captures the viewer: personal meditation that ends up into delivering collective meanings, the refusal of a methodology that becomes discipline, the randomness of collecting pieces of paper that transforms into structures in which nothing is wasted. For the ones who have the fortune to visit Reinhardt’s studio, one of the things that come to attention is that there are no remains.

Prof. Marco Pacioni University of Viterbo/The University of Georgia

Thomas Reinhardt starts each work without a preconceived scheme or idea, allowing the act of drawing, cutting, and assembling to guide him spontaneously towards new discoveries. The negatives of his cut-outs are never discarded but become the sinews of future works, opening up further explorations.

His abstract cut-outs dazzle the eye with their striking combinations: gaudy, glossy, clashing primary colours rub shoulders with the subtlest of exotic shades and textures. All the traditions of colour composition seem to be defied but somehow they come together in a kind of wild chorus. They flow over the surface in endlessly curling, fernlike forms that seem to be in constant motion. Yet these often come into collision with stiff, sharp-edged formal structures, just as the riot of colours is.often sobered by stern black bulks and outlines. Some of the larger pieces seem swept by a single tsunami of invention, curving and bucking in whorls and eddies over the whole expanse. Others lend their independent spaces to chess-like games of lopsided counterpoint.

Almost always there is a sense of vibrant surface life, a flatland of elbowing organic and geometrical forms where everything seems caught in a present instant.

An intense energy is released by the clash and conspiracy of colours, by the precarious and unpredictable equilibrium of the parts, by sudden rifts and gashes that threaten the evolving shapes. Most compositions are animated by an almost childlike exuberance, but others, especially the smaller formats, are quiet, meditative pieces of great simplicity, zen-like paradoxes of form and colour. But each work comes to evoke some overriding, unifying emotion—be it delight, celebration, puzzlement, horror, wonder, or just plain fun.

Bill Dodd

Bill Dodd was born in England and took his degree at Oxford. He taught English literature for over forty years in the universities of Bologna and Siena. He has published studies of romantic and twentieth-century poets (Keats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Edwin Muir) and of Shakespeare's plays and poetry.