Alert. Active.

The cutting wilted on the window sill.

I moved it to the desk I never work on. It lives there now with a small drawing table, my good camera, my big hard drive, two 3kg dumbbells and my sewing machine with the cord wrapped around the peddle. It tucks perfected under the arm.

The leaves are glossy now. Alert. Active.

I’ll dust the rest.

List

-mover with washing machine; laundry in drum

-camisole untied, satin, shining; bright green on brick

-burnt orange leaves; detached prematurely

-young cat on hind legs, tangled in broken blinds

-painting of zipper on exterior wall, teeth straining to conceal stone

Nightshade

I planted one of those vines on the terrace. I saw one grow in the most obscene of conditions. It pushed through its plastic container, into the sandy cracks of the grimy stones and toward earth or water or who knows. No one seemed to understand how that building came to be or what it was standing on. Did it even have a foundation? The vine knew. It inhabited invisible places and it grew. Inexplicably. It was spectacular for a moment: laden with blooms, home of inner city birds and insects, view from the window I could not open.

So I planted one of those vines on the terrace. A nightshade, for nights that are dark and still. It has a trellis to climb on that is properly constructed. It has an appropriate mix of soil for its container and the environmental conditions. It has access to sun and the air is clean. It has the company of wilder birds and the laughter of children. It is being treated with intent instead of consequence and yet, it isn’t doing much. It’s not dying but it’s hardly living. Like I said, this place isn’t for everyone.

Endurance

The laundry smells of stale sweat when it’s damp.

It started at the old house.

Subsequent washes cannot make it clean.

Sleep talk

I keep talking to you in my sleep. Last night I was trying to explain to you that it was my crippling self-awareness that did this. I don’t have any naïveté about it left. I lost that a long time ago but it took longer for the optimism to vacate. When you have a good rest and the sky is clear on either side, optimism grows but it’s a bit like pond scum. The sun made it from the miracle of micro-organisms but what is pond scum really doing for you? It hangs out where you wish it wouldn’t. It takes the reflection out of the waterline. It obscures where grassland begins and ends. It can make something look solid that isn’t. It can diminish a healthy fear of sinking.

This is the thing I was trying to make you understand during our sleep talk. You kept looking at me like I was choosing wrong, that I was killing something that deserved to live. When I woke, I looked up the number of grasses that grow here and found that there are more than 150 varieties with exponentially more variants. They are all blooming now and their pollen collects on our window screens and ledges. It’s residue with promise.

But today

But today it feels like a sky I’ve never seen. The fine stones in the side garden are so white I can barely look at them. I thought it was my new prescription but it’s really just been so long since the light has come in.

I see rust: Tomma Abts in Cologne

Don’t calculate it; tell it like it is.

They didn’t let me down.

I’m 46 now and being disappointed is familiar territory. This isn’t a sob story. Life is not terrible. Things are just other than I imagined. Everywhere. In everything. The bolts in the trim on the decking that I thought were perfectly maintained are coming loose. I see rust. I’ll need to have someone look at that. The sunny terrace is burning up in early June. The plants described as needing full sun would prefer that sun without so much heat. The anise that thrived a month ago is crispy. A lower frond, now orange, snapped off with the gentlest touch. It isn’t just at home where my powers of observation are heightened, where I will admit to being too sensitive, where every change in the equilibrium creates shockwaves. It happened also when I walked out of the train station and the cathedral was right there, like a sonic boom. I expected to find it, to discover it, but there it was immediately: the accumulation of a million choices, for better or for worse. I knew from reading about the older paintings that they were also an accumulations of choices. Jan Verwoert called it “choosing to choose” (1) and this made an enormous impression on me when I read it because choosing to choose seems to me an excellent mandate for any made thing, like a painting or a cathedral, or a day for that matter. At the end of each, or rather an end—because choosing to choose could result in any manner of endings—what we are left with is a reckoning. A reckoning which, if it is honest, reveals something about the agency involved in getting there. Standing in front of seven paintings by Tomma Abts, this is what didn’t let me down.

And can I say how afraid I was to be let down? I had made the paintings and the practice of Tomma Abts into a lodestar of sorts. Look at this woman: making beautifully-crafted, intelligent, modestly sized paintings at a humane pace and hanging them up on a wall in a nice gallery, and not even very often at that. She is not sharing process updates. She is not sharing views of her studio or what she eats for lunch. Frankly, I don’t know anything about the way Tomma Abts goes to her studio or makes her paintings except for what the paintings permit me to discover and this, if you have the good fortune to stand in front of them, is a surprising amount. The seven paintings gathered together for this particular exhibition present structurally in three small groups: the first group are two paintings like the ones Jan Verwoert wrote about in Choosing to Choose. They are modestly-sized (48 x 38 centimetres), on rectangular stretchers wrapped with canvas and set on the portrait orientation. The titles are names; a familiar beginning. The second group are not regular stretchers. These stretchers already have a form. Here, Tomma has made the first of two other choices about beginning. She has inserted roundness into the rectilinearity of two frames and another is compressed and has opposing corners removed. It feels like a parallelogram but it isn’t. The titles are still names; a slightly different beginning. Abts makes the second of her two other choices in beginning with the third group containing two paintings. One is delicately shaped—its upper right corner has been planed off at a straight angle—and the second is large but not very large (86.5 x 63.5 centimetres). These two paintings in the third structural group aren’t stretched with canvas but what the gallery records as sailcloth. It is thin but strong. Humble in appearance but technical in its performance. Light moves over it and also into it. These sailcloth paintings are a new beginning; they are not paintings in the way that I have seen Tomma Abts make paintings.

Tomma Abts
Ayelt, 2022
Acrylic and oil on canvas
48 x 38 cm

Ayelt (2022) is closest to the paintings that I know, the paintings I didn’t want to be disappointed by. The surface of this painting—its surprising revelation of form, dimension and colour—I can’t think of a better word for it than mystical. It is earthly effort amounting to transcendence and looking at it intently for a prolonged period was like being pierced through the heart, like Teresa in ecstasy. The line which is the subject of this painting unfolds with such a glorious lilt that one cannot fathom having just arrived here. There must have been a plan; there must have been a strategy; there must have been tape! But this is not how Tomma Abts makes a painting. We must accept it in faith: this all came about in the making of the painting (2). We have arrived here with Abts without knowing from the beginning that we would. This is even the case with the shaped canvases and the two paintings whose corners hold circular forms. This beginning decision seems to dictate the foregone conclusion that a circle will be present in the composition. At first I thought this a remarkable exception but now I think it is less so. Geometry is present in any beginning, like the sun or moon on the horizon.

Tomma Abts
VI, 2022
Oil on canvas
86.3 x 63.5 cm

Tomma Abts
VII, 2022
Soluble wax crayon on cotton and sailcloth
86.5 x 63.5 cm

One of the circle canvases, VI, shares its nomenclature with a painting on sailcloth (VII, 2022). This is curious. The change in title practice from name to number and these two particular paintings in numerical sequence is the happening in this assembly of seven paintings. They made me think, suddenly, about the books and diagrams my father used while taking sailing lessons when I was very young. He had several text books and also a binder of worksheets to solve equations. I can recall charts of currents and wind, explanations of sail sizes and functions and many drawings of knots whose competent constructions could hold enormous swaths of sail taunt. My father’s books also contained an explanation of tacking and jibing, the way the bow or stern of a sailboat could be manoeuvred into the wind. It was bizarre to me then that a boat had to head in the opposite direction of a destination in order to arrive there but this doesn’t seem so strange to me now. Excess effort, tangents, detours, disruption and residue is the material of middle adult life.

Let me explain this further. Ayelt’s pristine execution had me in raptures. It is a masterful painting and (satisfyingly) what I expected but VII is the painting that has stayed with me all of these weeks. In VII, Abts used soluble wax-crayon on sailcloth in place of paint. In looking and now looking again, I imagine her approaching the surface in the way that she approaches every other beginning. She chooses to make a mark but, significantly, this wax crayon mark dissolves. It dissolves into the whiteness of the sailcloth like incense ash in a cathedral or rust on the bolts of my decking in the rain. It softens and dissipates like the parched anise fronds between my fingers. In all of the paintings I have known by Tomma Abts, I have not seen her marks fall apart. They always hold fast like a good tack or jibe but in VII, they melt into the current and drift off course. The monochrome palette of VI with its hard line and radials seems to prepare us for it. It’s wound so tight that VII is an honest release. An honest reckoning.

Don’t calculate it; tell it like it is.

Expectations are tricky. They grow from an accumulation of choices, like a painting or a cathedral, or a day for that matter. They make us think that what we can imagine is all that can satisfy us. Expectations met are satisfying but not sustaining. Arriving somewhere you want to go is nice. Arriving somewhere you didn’t expect to be is better.

Tomma Abts was presented at Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 21 April 2023 - 24 June 2023.
All images via Galerie Buchholz, Cologne.

(1) “Choosing to choose” is the subject of Jan Verwoert’s essay “Choosing to Choose: On the Paintings of Tomma Abts” included in the collection Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want (2010).
(2) Jan Verwoert, “Choosing to Choose: On the Paintings of Tomma Abts” in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, ed. Vanessa Ohlraun (Berlin: Piet Zwart Institute and Sternberg Press, 2010), 240-241.

Dry heat

And now the air is thick. Just yesterday I said that it hadn’t changed. It was still fluid, like water rushing in a spring thaw but now, it has density. I am pushing it around in the ways that I know how, trying to thin it out.

I remembered this now. After decades of dry heat in a house without air conditioning, she told me that the solution was closure. Closure as long as there was daylight. All of the openings must be shut. Windows. Doors. Skylights. Vents. Everything must remain dark within a house until darkness arrives without. A household in the heat of summer must ignore the day until the night. Then it can open up.

Last night it was light until past 11. Darkness retreated again before 4. Four hours cannot dissolve what twenty has thickened.

Cuttings

No one needs ten cuttings of the same plant. Eleven if you count the tiny stub. Yes, they’re all living. I cut them with my new Olfa blade.

Their raw edges are healed now. If I place one in a glass of damp soil on the window ledge, white filaments will appear in ten to fourteen days time.

But honestly, that’s more than I can manage. I don’t have ten glasses.

Sharp halos

Well, I guess that’s the end of it.

He said.

We sat on the terrace for two days in the afternoon. The sun was stronger than expected. Even he said so as he ducked inside to retrieve his cap.

I guess that’s all we’re going to get.

He said.

It’s already obvious that the chairs will dry and bleach in the light. He assembled them from flat packs that came in the post. There were pre-drilled holes for the slats in the back and the seat. Sharp halos.

None of the weather forecasters agree. Each presents a different parade of icons.

Sun ball with lumpy cloud.

Sun ball with lumpy dark cloud.

Lumpy dark cloud with broken lines, pointing left.

Swimming

I stopped swimming. It wasn’t a decision so much as a consequence. I honestly thought it was probably just a delay in swimming. I was busy packing again and in between the sorting and purging, the wrapping and the containing, the swimming pool became inaccessible.

Wait, that isn’t entirely true.

The outdoor swimming season was almost over and I remember this now. As it was approaching, I noticed that they had stopped cleaning the tank. There were bandaid flotillas and a hair clump skimmed the edge of my mouth. These were the things I saw and felt. It got harder to breath thinking about things invisible.

There was also the matter of getting there. It isn’t that there weren’t enjoyable aspects. I liked the ferry a lot. In fact, the ferry was a thing that stopped me from being able to leave that city for a long time. But what about being able to cross this water with your bicycle on a boat? I thought about this. It was something only insiders knew, like who has to yield when two cyclists approach the same intersection at the same speed in the dark. Having insider information is nice. It isn’t something I have here, in the new place and maybe that’s why I’ve stopped with swimming for the time being. I know there is a beautiful swimming pool in this city. It’s 50 meters long which is the best length and I’ve read that it has a retractable roof for the summer so you can feel the sun on your back or your face, depending on your stroke. The annual membership fee is reasonable, even with inflation and I am such a good swimmer. I never learned to breath bilaterally but instead trained myself to breath on my right side every sixth breath although sometimes I fall back to every fourth which is respectable. I know where the swimming pool is and how to get there on foot or by bike. Swimming is this thing I have been doing for a while now with skill, commitment and discipline and yet I cannot get to the point where I want to do it again. I know how to do it but at the moment I really just want to do something else.

List

-tall priest on bicycle wearing glasses and sport coat in oversized houndstooth print

-woman wearing French worker chemise, bicycling while brushing her hair, ash grey

-couple, looking at each other while bicycling; she cradles a bright yellow cake box in her left arm and doesn’t struggle to keep it level