Herbert Pföstl: Between Field and Firmament
Bolinas Museum
June 10, 2023 - August 6, 2023
Artist, writer, and translator Herbert Pföstl’s recent paintings are studies of the liminal—within both place and time. These “landscapes” exist between field and firmament, at the edges of thresholds, in the visible traces of vanishing forms. Pföstl takes inspiration from the geologic, and his paintings often appear lithic. Just as the surface of a stone is a visual relic of the passing of time or the disappearance of place—in the layering and resurfacing of various minerals from different epochs—the surfaces of Pföstl’s paintings are created through an accumulation of many coats of pigment, which the artist then carefully wears away through abrasion or erasure and builds up again in cycles. What interests Pföstl is the alluvial: a stillness in the sediment that remains after the passing of time or other forces in nature.
These small paintings function as reliquaries in which Pföstl both fathoms and enfolds lost or departing landscapes. In its Old English iteration, the word “fathom” once meant “to embrace or encircle with one’s arms” before the word morphed into a unit of measure equivalent to an arm span or six feet. But these paintings depict what cannot be traditionally seen or held: silent hymns of layered time, relics of light, and tectonic shifts.
