In colour

Elvis the blue dog

by Paola Paleari

In one episode of my 3-year-old son’s favourite cartoon series, Simon Super Rabbit, the titular character introduces his young audience to the world of colours. Standing beside a large canvas on an easel, brush in hand, Simon cheerfully announces: “Here’s the colour blue! Do you know what things are blue?” Close-up on the canvas, a pool of water begins to flow from the brush tip. “Blue like the sea… blue like Elvis.”

Elvis – as we know from overhearing the show streaming from the laptop while we scramble to put together a decent dinner at witching hour – is the pet dog living with Simon’s grandparents. And though it may already stretch reason that a family of rabbits would own a dog, in Simon’s whimsical world it feels entirely logical that the dog is, in fact, blue.

Therefore, dear children, as shown by the painting on the easel: it is blue like Elvis; Elvis is a dog = it is blue like a dog. The semantic exactness leaves no room to doubt this equation, which is now as accurate as it can be both in Simon’s and our reality.

I wish I could bring this example up with Troels Wörsel and have a conversation with him about it. I would like to ask him why we don’t even question a blue dog in a cartoon, yet we feel compelled to find a deeper meaning if we see the very same thing in a painting. Time and again, in his notes, texts and interviews, he stated that colour only has a differentiating function. Colour is, in other words, a pure separator between the individual elements that comprise a painting. By this reasoning, a dog can certainly be blue if that is what is needed to distinguish A from B on the picture’s surface. Or better, it has to be blue.

This same semantic precision in Elvis’ blueness is evident in Wörsel’s paintings – whether in his colour compositions, monochromes, making-a-sauce paintings, electric drill paintings, the list can go on and on. There is a necessity, one could even say an intransigence in his approach to producing works that make their form, motif and style secondary to the point of irrelevance: they are conduits through which the picture reveals itself. At the same time, and because of that, they are absolutely indispensable to the painting and therefore non-negotiable: they are information for the picture to exist and not aesthetic choices for us to speculate on.

“I’m not interested in paintings where the contents can be interpreted arbitrarily,” wrote Troels Wörsel in 1985. A painting should be seen as an entity in its own right, not as a reflection of reality or an expression of who painted it. But the human mind is biased, and to the regular brain – wired by associations influencing everything from daily decisions to social codes and inner passions – that’s easier said than done. Especially when the painting contains figurative elements, things that resemble X or Y , hints to the known world. Oh, look at the chest drawers – don’t they remind of…? I suppose that with those lines, the artist is trying to say…

Troels Wörsel is a painters’ painter – I have heard multiple times in connection to his practice. A phrase used to indicate the kind of artist who has a deep understanding of their medium, someone whose work is intended more for insiders with a trained eye than for casual viewers or mainstream audiences. But is that even true? Maybe it’s about time to think of his contributions as an elevated form of undoing, an unlearning process that simply allows the world to disclose itself – making it possible to separate pure visual experience from personal perception. Seen in this light, his paintings are extraordinarily liberating. The final step in Wörsel’s path of non-attachment, and his highest aspiration for himself and for us, is to see with the clarity of Simon’s young pals, where a dog can just be blue, and that is all there is to it.

Troels Wörsel (born 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark, died 2018 in Cologne, Germany) found inspiration in American minimal and conceptual art early in his career. A prolific artist, Wörsel’s fundamental interest was in painting, its limits and possibilities, its history, function and formal characteristics. He developed a dynamic, highly investigative practice that saw him employ experimental techniques such as painting with an electric drill; working on the reverse of a canvas, integrating the frame into the painted surface; using culinary sauce recipes as though instructions for his artistic output. The artist worked almost exclusively in series whether on canvas, paper or in print. He explored themes and approaches that spanned from Japanese Zen (1970s), to gastronomy (1980s), equine depictions (2000s), to garden scenes and abstract, graphic series (2010s).