Sous la Figure, La Plage: The Painting of Bertram Schilling at the Threshold of Abstraction

Sous la Figure, La Plage: The Painting of Bertram Schilling at the Threshold of Abstraction

A booth, a banquet. TOP Berlin* at Supermarket 2026.

A critical essay on the paintings of Bertram Schilling exhibited at Supermarket 2026, Stockholm.

by Natasha Marzliak, Curator, Art Critic, Professor of Art History and Aesthetics, and Associate Editor of Art Style Magazine

Night and hangover are the same god, just as Bertram Schilling’s paintings are. Intoxication dissolves the self, dissolves the protective distance between the critic and what he/she/they look(s) at, makes seeing hurt in a way sobriety refuses. There is a force that form carries without being able to contain it entirely, the charge that traverses the surface and undoes it from within. I needed this to enter Schilling’s canvases. His partner, brother, and friends prepared the ritual, the space for what the paintings would demand.

I came to Stockholm with the beautiful and painful mission of writing about Supermarket Independent Art Fair and, above all, about Schilling’s paintings. The fair: twenty years selling what has no price to those who did not come to buy. The Erskinehuset, in Slakthusområdet (the former abattoir district of Stockholm), is the right space for this. More than sixty artist-run initiatives from various countries, no galleries as intermediaries, no silent pressure of the collector circulating. A structure indifferent to the market’s expectations. Autonomy that produces work suspending immediate legibility, answerable to no one.

Writing about Schilling is painful because the absence that should organize the writing keeps pressing through it, the way the force presses through the surface of the canvases, collapsing the distance that would make criticism possible.

Plato’s Symposium works this way: thought about what matters only happens while the bodies are still at the table, while the conversation still finds reason to continue, while Eros, the force that moves between what is present and what is absent, holds the room. Last Friday, Schilling’s partner, Pernilla cooked for the group in Stockholm. There was wine. There were the paintings sent by his brother Clemens. The night was still open. Blanchot, in La Communauté inavouable (1983), wrote that there are communities that only exist in the sharing of loss, that form precisely where something irreparable happened and where no one pretends otherwise. That dinner was this: a feast that life makes possible only because the dead are inside it, active, present in every gesture of hospitality. The conversation circled around the present and the non-present, around that pulse of life which exists precisely because it does not conceal what is missing.

Bertram Schilling, Kim Dotty Hachmann, Matthias Roth, and Ricarda Wallhaeuser studied with the same Prof. Lobeck at Kunsthochschule Kassel in the 90s. They founded the artist initiative microwesten under the umbrella of TOP Berlin together. Schilling died in 2023. They placed the paintings on the walls of the booth. What those walls held is what this text attempts to approach.

When I stood before the works, I felt the cold first. The cold of Stockholm in April I already carried in my coat. This was another cold, older, coming from inside the paint. What I felt, the canvases had already decided beyond retrieval. Greys, desaturated blues, whites that weigh like compressed matter. According to his partner, Schilling was thinking about painting all the time, in the places he passed through, on the living room sofa. In his almost recognisable landscapes, painting was the way to register the ground beneath his feet as duration, as something that had happened to a body. The hand leaves a trace no subsequent interpretation can fully claim. The snow that recurs series upon series compresses the vegetation, the soil, the horizon line, removes the atmospheric buffer between form and the pressure form carries, leaves the pictorial elements exposed to the weight of what the painter chose not to resolve. It is a reduction, a simplification in reverse. What remains when the snow has passed is the skeleton of existence.

The contours are black and deliberate, holding the planes apart by force, refusing the atmospheric fusion that would be the easy consolation. Schilling’s canvases exist at the threshold between the recognisable and the irreducible: the landscape is almost there, almost nameable, and it is precisely this suspension, this refusal to resolve into either pure figuration or pure abstraction, that gives the surface its particular pressure. Here one feels Munch of the late Norwegian landscapes, where the horizon remains opaque to the eye, where the sky weighs on the earth like a question left standing. In those late works the paint surface carries its own gravity, the horizon a sealed line, as if landscape had decided it no longer needed to be entered. And De Staël: the figure that exists before knowing what it is, planes of colour suspended at the moment before the decision between abstract and figurative, the canvas that demands to be read in more than one direction, a refusal to resolve that the paint enforces from within.

And then I felt the solitude. Solitude inscribed on the surface by the hand, prior to any theme, and heavier than any. The black contour that keeps each plane at a distance from the others carries an entire worldview: things exist separately, the space between them is real, and the paint affirms it without apology. After solitude, fear. The plain fear of standing before a work that gazes back.

Didi-Huberman analyses this in Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (1992). Before certain surfaces, something resists our visual possession and looks back at us as a structural operation of the canvas. The argument emerges from an experience in front of Tony Smith’s minimalist works: black boxes that return something of the order of death, of the tomb, of what refuses to be possessed by the living. In Schilling’s canvases, this effect gains a still sharper precision because what the surface holds is the death of a specific person who painted there, who left the trace of the hand, who chose that quality of grey and not another. The canvas looks at us with the eyes of one who has gone. Lyotard, in Discours, Figure (1971), names the force that produces this effect from inside the image: sous la figure, le désir, a structural tension prior to any reading, which acts within the figure and prevents it from closing on itself as a complete sign, deforming it by a charge it carries without being able to absorb. For Lyotard, the visual field is traversed by a force that representation registers without domesticating. It is the pressure that form contains and does not exhaust. What Lyotard locates inside the canvas, Didi-Huberman locates in the interval between the canvas and whoever looks at it. They are the same movement seen from opposite sides of a vibrating surface.

And in this tension, in this compressed winter, in this solitude heavier than any theme, in this fear returned by the gaze, in this wine that dissolves the protective distance, I found something I did not expect. A freedom. Sous le pavé, la plage: as a pictorial condition, as what exists beneath the snow that compresses, beneath the contour that separates, beneath the weight of the horizon that resists the eye. There is a layer that form carries without being able to contain, an existence that presses the surface upward from below, that surges precisely where form reaches its limit. Schilling’s landscape is where existence appears raw, unadorned, with that strange freedom that only comes when there is no longer an illusion to sustain. A freedom of sky and flesh.

The booth as banquet: Schilling painted whole spaces of existence, and Kim and Matthias brought them to Stockholm so that they go on pressing against whoever stands before them. It is the force that Lyotard named and Didi-Huberman felt returned: the désir beneath the figure, the gaze that the surface sends back across the irreversible distance between the dead and the living, and that no subsequent interpretation can extinguish. The community that forms before these canvases is the same that formed at Pernilla’s table, what Blanchot called la communauté inavouable: the one that exists only because something irreparable happened. That instant passed. In Bertram Schilling’s paintings, the instant stayed. What stayed looks at us.

* TOP Berlin is a transdisciplinary collective based in Berlin. Bertram Schilling, Kim Dotty Hachmann, Ricarda Wallhaeuser and Matthias Roth, all graduated from the Kunsthochschule Kassel, University of Kassel, together with Julia Hürter formed the nomadic artist initiative microwesten around the year 2002. Bertram Schilling later established the artist projects “Being in the word” and “Mind map memory”. Bertram Schilling died 2023.

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