the sight of clouds – domgasse*

In late October 2023, Gerhard Lang spent a week working on a rooftop terrace in the Domgasse, a street in the First District in the centre of Vienna, very close to St. Stephen’s Cathedral. On large sheets of paper he drew “the seeing of clouds”. As the drawing developed, his eyes were fixed continually on the clouds. The approach to drawing he employed is generally known as blind drawing, but in Lang’s practice it is referred to as visus signatus, “drawn seeing”.

The resulting drawings are part of Gerhard Lang’s body of landscape work, in which the artist treats landscape not as a walkable entity, but as something that only emerges during the process of perception. In the same way as Lang regards landscape as not physically palpable, he also considers seeing itself to be some- thing invisible, something that in the final analysis is never fully tangible. We are able to see clouds, but the act of seeing retreats behind what is being seen. In other words: resonant in everything we see is something that is invisible. In the invisibility of the act of seeing we discern the clouds, we perceive the world. This feature of seeing is replicated in all our senses: we experience the act of see- ing as incompletely as we hear the act of hearing or smell the act of smelling.

If viewed solely from this perspective, we surmise the enigmatic nature of our sensory experience of the world and how we perceive it. Coming back to Gerhard Lang’s visus signatus, there is a similar interplay between the eyes and the hand holding the pencil. In the process of drawing as practised by Lang, the eyes and the hand become engaged in an uninterrupted connection between clouds, eyes, body, hand, pencil and the line as it evolves at that very moment on the paper. The technique of visus signatus allows one to make an approximation to the phenomenon “cloud” in two respects. First, a short circuit is established between the developing line and the seen cloud that in a flash dissolves the distance between them. Second, the sustained, uninterrupted seeing of a cloud gives rise to a particular proximity to this cloud.

When drawing in the visus signatus mode, the received visual impression travels through the body into the hand, which transforms the stimuli into movement and application of pressure. Hands cannot see, sing or smell, but thanks to their delicately boned anatomy and their nervous inner life they are unmatched specialists in the highly complex coordination of movement, tactile sensation and haptic response. The concerted collaboration of eyes and hand is an indecipherable process. As such significant factors in the development of human action, our hands with their own specific experience and intelligence attempt from time to time to dispense with visual impressions. This was what Gerhard Lang felt when he adopted the visus signatus technique. Initially, he still occasionally perceived the hand directing the pencil as detached from the body. Similar to his experience with walking backwards in his performance “Through the Looking Glass II” in New York City in 2012/13, he found himself needing to gradually adjust everything to a fundamentally different approach.

In conventional drawing techniques we observe the hand holding the pencil as we draw. Here, our hand is being led by (pre)conception and memory and not by our seeing. The visus signatus method takes the opposite approach: the hand is being led by our seeing, in this case, by the seeing of clouds. However, just as the invisible act of seeing coalesces with what is seen, the hand is inscribed into the drawing. Nevertheless, the hand remains invisible as a hand in the drawing. What the hand creates is distinct from the hand itself – exactly as the act of see- ing shows us something other than the act of seeing. In effect, each instance of a line being set on paper is a highly complex procedure. Every line results from an occurrence that includes the invisible act of seeing and the impenetrable manual translation process. In this respect, each drawing, whether done by conventional or visus signatus techniques, harbours an invisible dimension within its visible presence. Each line points beyond itself, or, as the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels might put it: each line is simultaneously intimate and alien to us.

Gerhard Lang’s landscape work embraces both spheres of life, town and country. We experience town and country differently, but in terms of history, politics and nature both are tightly intertwined. It might seem paradoxical that since the 17th century as far as is known, the artists in the history of Western landscape painting did not themselves work on the land. Landscape artists brought their experience of urban life with them when they began working: Claude Lorrain, John Constable or the painters of the Hudson River School in the US. Each one of them saw cloud above the city or the countryside and saw that clouds changed appearance depending on the topographical character of the region they were in. This aspect struck above all the painters of the Hudson River School after they had spent considerable time studying clouds in skies over Europe, only then to experience the immeasurably broader landscape forms in North America. When Gerhard Lang was drawing the seeing of passing clouds over Vienna, he located the landscape issue in that realm of life that was central to the origin of landscape painting: the city. C. N.

✴ Dom means Cathedral. Domgasse translates as Cathedral Lane