Bio
Born in 1964 in Mechelen, Belgium, Wittmann lives in Brussels.
Self-taught, he began painting at the age of 27 when starting a psycho analysis. It took him about 30 years of relentless search in order to find a style that he could call his own. His work is questioning the interpretation of language.
He only started exhibiting his work, for the first time in Brussels in 2019. Since then his work has been shown in several galleries in Belgium, France, Italy and the US.
His work was selected to be shown in the psychiatric hospital, Laramée, in Brussels.
In January 2023 one of his works was acquired by the Montefiore Hospital Art Foundation, New York.
Statement
Wittmann believes that art finds it foundation in the origin of humanity. He therefore uses the origin of alphabets which are signs to question the interpretation of language.
Language
Noun
1. Function of expression of thought and communication between humans, implemented by speech or writing. Language study.
2. Any system of signs allowing communication.
Inspired by the origin of alphabets, he has created a range of signs that he uses in his daily work, just as a writer uses words.
Writing enables the reader to elicit precise mental images. Signs, on the other hand, are not dependent on a particular language and therefore “allow mental associations of a different order to that of written languages” (Celine Masson).
Signs have no direct or precisely codified relation to reality and distinguished themselves by a degree of abstraction. As Wittmann's aim is to stimulate the viewer's imagination each sign is designed//selected for its aesthetic and expressive qualities.
Wittmann's motivation is to lead the spectator to question himself and if possible to put him in a position of uncertainty even if it means creating a form of ambiguity in relation to what he perceives.
By abandoning the work to the gaze of the spectator, Wittmann's goal is to provoke his imagination while not trying to provide any answers.
It Concerns Me!
Lecture by Marc Segers, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, at the Odradek Exhibition, on June 7th 2024.
I. Introduction
First, a big thank you to Simone Schuiten for inviting us, not only to speak to you this evening but especially to reflect, develop, and shape all the questions, mysteries, enigmas, charms, and subtleties that this exhibition carries for us.
Before we begin, we must say from where we speak: we are not semioticians, not artists, not philosophers, not specialists in anything, not art historians either—just people interested in art and psychoanalysis.
It is this interest that led us, four years ago, along with some psychoanalyst colleagues from the Association of the Freudian Cause, to set up a seminar that aimed to explore the relationships that these two fields, art and psychoanalysis, can maintain: psychoanalysis can help us see art better, but conversely, art also helps to illuminate psychoanalysis. This is what Lacan signified with his famous homage to Marguerite Duras in 1965: "…remember with Freud that in his field, the artist always precedes the psychoanalyst, and that he therefore does not have to play the psychologist where the artist leads the way." In other words, the psychoanalyst does not have to psychoanalyze an artist or a work, but rather to learn from what the artist and their work can teach him.
And if we called our seminar "The Art's Saying," it is in reference to someone’s question in a seminar in 1977, asking if art was not something pre-verbal, something before speech. He replied: "I am trying to say that art, in its occasion, is beyond symbolism... I believe there is more truth in the saying of art than in any bla-bla... It is not a pre-verbal, it is a verbal to the second power." A verbal squared, therefore: in art, there is something that says more than long speeches, and that says what long speeches cannot.
I will return to psychoanalysis later.
Here, the bla-bla we are going to propose will only make sense if it allows us to see better or to see more than what the two artists show us. They precede us, meaning it is up to us now to try to see after them what they took so much time and creativity to develop, and to teach us.
So let us begin with the generic theme that unites the two artists present here, but which is also a theme dear to the gallery and the Odradek project.
II. Asemic Dialogue: What Does That Mean?
A dialogue is a conversation between two people on a defined subject. In philosophy, for example, we know the dialogues of Socrates.
Asemic refers to writing that does not rely on clear or precise linguistic meaning, that has no specific semantic content. It is therefore outside meaning. However, it distinguishes itself from abstract art by retaining the physical characteristics of writing, such as lines and symbols.
In the case of Philip and Aika, Odradek proposes a dialogue between them, i.e., a form of discourse aimed at advancing a questioning, based on their shared interest in a certain relationship with writing, which includes signs but without semantic content, meaning outside meaning. They began this questioning with their works. And we will try to continue it, with our modest means and our limitations.
A sign then? It is a perceived thing that refers to the existence or truth of another thing to which it is linked, and which allows it to be distinguished and recognized. It has synonyms like index, mark, manifestation, signal, symbol. In linguistics, since Ferdinand de Saussure, it is a dual-faced entity, one sensible, which is the signifier, i.e., the acoustic image, material, the sound form that we hear or the graphic symbol that we see; and the other, the signified, i.e., the concept or idea that the sign represents. Note that there is no natural relationship between the signifier and the signified.
Insofar as it concerns semantics (semantics is the branch of linguistics that studies the meaning and significance of words), and since we are dealing here with two artists from very different cultures, one Western, the other Japanese, it is difficult not to evoke Roland Barthes. Philosopher and semiotician, he has always been interested in the signs and meanings they convey. He starts from the principle that the meaning of a sign, whatever it may be, always lies in the relationship it has with other signs. A sign does not exist alone. It is included in networks of signs.
If we want to extract meaning from the signs we perceive, we must then focus on the networks of relationships they weave among themselves. Strongly interested, and more than that, attracted to Japan, he demonstrated this in an important book: "Empire of Signs." He demonstrates the difference and often the opposition between two networks of relationships between signs, between two systems therefore: one is the West, the other is Japan.
These differences between systems are marked for him in writing as well as in the way of eating, preparing food, living in a house, building cities, making theater, poetry, being polite, designing a garden... i.e., constructing a world.
After this long preamble, necessary in our view to give landmarks to what we are talking about and not to get lost in complex considerations, let us now come to the works that surround us. I will speak about Philip's work, and Christiane about Aika's.
III. Philip
In Philip's works, the first impression, which one immediately grasps, is that it is about writing. At first glance, we do not think of simple lines or drawings. It is indeed signs that we are dealing with. In this case, signs that evoke, without being them, the signs of Asian languages, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, where the boundaries between drawing, painting, calligraphy, and writing become blurred. Sometimes they appear in series that succeed and align with each other, sometimes they intermingle. And, as Barthes says, each sign being supposed to have a relationship with other signs to form a meaning, this meaning, inevitably, we seek it, it should be there, in the background of what we see.
The temptation is therefore strong, at least for us Westerners, to see in these signs signifiers, referring to signifieds, something that opens up to a meaning. We are tempted to think that there is something to understand, a secret meaning to decipher. And since, of course, this resists, we rush to the title that should enlighten us. Except that it does not enlighten anything at all. Thus, there is a tension between a network of obscure signs that resist any understanding, signs that do not lend themselves to the division signifier-signified, and a title in which we indeed find meaning, a signified, but which has nothing to do with the succession or intertwining of signs. In other words, while Philip's writing is fundamentally asemic, i.e., fundamentally outside meaning, meaning is still invoked by the title. And we cling to the title to escape this vertigo that seizes us when we cannot latch onto something known and familiar.
This is where Philip first appears to be a Western artist, even if his signs may evoke the East. Western rationality indeed has a hard time, as Barthes reminds us, accepting the outside meaning. If something exists, it must have meaning. "The West moistens everything with meaning," he says. And he talks about the means employed in the West to "avoid the disgrace of nonsense." Barthes takes haikus as an example: "I arrive by the mountain path. Ah! This is exquisite! A violet."
Or: "Already four o'clock... I got up nine times... to admire the moon."
Or this again: "In the fisherman's house, the smell of dried fish... and the warmth."
The West will always try to see in these three-line verses a symbol, a metaphor, or a syllogism; meaning, something to understand. This is not the case in Japan where the reading of haiku aims, on the contrary, to suspend meaning, to shake it, to make it fall. Like the koan or the blow of the Zen master's stick, which aim each time to awaken the disciple, to disconnect him from meaning and the imaginary to confront him with the real.
This is what, in my eyes, Philip's work is attached to: "I give you this to see. You want to find meaning in it. I encourage you by giving a title. I even attract you by giving it all a beautiful aesthetic packaging. And then, wham, there is none. There is nothing, it is the absence."
Well, this is exactly the function of interpretation in psychoanalysis. We suffer from too much meaning. We do not know how to do without it. Our symptoms are the fruit of meaning, conscious, and especially unconscious, which clutters us and permeates and invades everything that happens in our lives. Contrary to what one might think, psychoanalysis does not aim to give meaning to symptoms: it is because those who suffer from them are burdened by them, it is because these symptoms contain unconscious meaning, it is because there is an excess of meaning, often contradictory and incompatible, in the unconscious, that these symptoms emerge. Psychoanalysis, on the contrary, aims to dry up meaning, to reduce it, to remove its layers, to free the subject from the meanings that clutter him. Lacan dreamed of achieving interpretations that would have the power of the Zen koan. The koans are very short quotes in the form of absurd enigmas, which precisely aim to abandon reasoning or any other intellectual consideration to confront the real. For example: "Can an illusion exist?" or "Each truth has four corners. Here is one corner, you find the other three."
Philip's works function a bit like this for me: they lead us into the search for meaning, but the more we look for it, the more it escapes us. The signifiers we see remain mute. No signified comes to support them. Just as the koan in Zen Buddhism aims to create an experience of pure presence, the very absence of meaning in Philip's works becomes a presence, and it is this absence that becomes the subject of the work.
IV. Conclusion
It is precisely here that the asemic dialogue between Philip and Aika unfolds. The absence of meaning in their works does not signify emptiness but invites the viewer into an active contemplation. It's an invitation to experience the work beyond the confines of rational interpretation, to engage with it in a way that is both profound and elusive, much like the Zen koans that Philip's work recalls. In doing so, they transcend the boundaries between language, art, and meaning, and create a space where the viewer is invited to find their own path in the labyrinth of signs, where sometimes, the only thing to find is the beauty of the labyrinth itself.