GO, TRAVEL, DRIVE Essay on Mayo Bucher’s work “SINNBILDER” by Volker Schunk (1995)

There are very few first pictures which are at the same time the last pictures – I mean those which can hardly be surpassed, those which, as visual-philosophical gestures, mark absolute reference points in modern art. The reference here is to the ’Black Square’ by Malevich, the ’naked icon’ of 1913, at the end of all conceivable reduction, at the threshold to the dissolution of itselfs.

Mayo Bucher’s work is as much a respectful homage to the most radical work of the twentieth century as it is an attempt at testing, at distancing and transformation from the perspective of his own work. Bucher’s paraphrasing is marginal, but obvious: The format has clearly been expanded, the picture plane has mutated to picture space, the texture appears mor pictorial. Still more decisive, the second dimension, the barely visible graphic incision. The hair-thin, whitish contour of the rotated, ’set’ square creates not only a formal tension between the black surface or the black space; the incised square delineates an act of qualifying, places distance between itself and the real ground of the painting and also the historical example. The line, which has been cut into the surface using a scalpel, connects the drawing with the space, is a gesture of aggression and subtlety, unites physical approach with reflective distance, throws the glance back to the beginning of modern art.

A few words more about the conception of Mayo Bucher’s paintings as overlays, as ’double layering’ of coulor dimension and contour in simple geometric relations. The linear figuration as doubling, as paraphrase, as spatial shift or as rotation of the coulor form. Although carved into the ground of the painted surface, the linear form floats as though it were in front of the colour field, creating depth, connecting logos and clarity with the emotive space of the colour. The incised contour, regardless if diagonal, rectangel or parallelogram, is the mental adversary of the work – the pictorial, the colour field stirred by paint strokes is its breath, its soul – if an anthropomorphic metaphor is allowed here.

The game is completely paradoxical: enclosing a space, limiting through the use of the line of a rational form, not only to define it, but much more to open it, to make it permeable to perception (of truth), so that the immediate given visibility transcends to a different sort of seeing.

The colour spaces of the paintings, some of which are large, point less to the Swiss Concrete artists, rather to American coulour-field painting, to artists such as Barnett Newman and Robert Mangold. However, Bucher‘s paintings are painted on wooden panels, their physical presence a prerequisite; of primary importance, the traces of the arbitrary, the spontaneous, the process-like, scraped on with a hard brush, registering the surfaces with movement, light, and darkness. The mostly dark, soft-toned range of grey hues, olive-brown tones, the velvet red-black of the acrylic and oil paints, these chromatic constellations and the textures of the surface appear to me to be those elements of Bucher’s work which largely evade verbal discourse, and at the same time express themselves as the most subjective and intimate gestures of his work.

Occasionally life itself reaches into the worlds of paintings, whose identity illuminates through its difference to the biosphere. Most of the pieces have titles which mirror the work, with humor and irony, out of its strict self-reference back into the horizon of language, meaning and the world of life.

’A-WA-SE’, a Japanese concept from Aikido which could be translated as ’agreement’ or ’balance’. It is the name of a piece whose ’floating’ counterpart above the rectangular base form swings lightly out of the vertical. Or there is the group of ’Gemini paintings’, large format compositions with two corner squares, the sides of which are the equivalent of one-third the diagonal measurement of the painting. The squares in the corners present identical colour surfaces. Or, depending on the version, the questions arises whether they are identical or not.

Mayo Bucher chose the motto ’symbols’ for this series of work. It has been left open whether this many-facetted concept is now to be understood as ’meaningful sign or symbol’, or whether, in the ambivalence of its connotation, it is up to the discretion of the senses and what is signified to decide. In its most original meaning, in the Indo-Germanic roots, ’sent’ meant the world ’go, travel, drive’. Mayo Bucher’s paintings now have their own lives. Let’s send them on their journey.

Volker Schunk, Ph. d. is an art journalist and independent curator