The source of Laidig’s pictorial programme lies beyond the eastern horizon, in Kyoto, Japan, to be precise. In 1997, she was prizewinning artist at the Kyoto Arts Festival and executed a work at the lo- cal temple district. Laidig’s fascination with the history of Japanese garden design brought her closer to the concept of wabi-sabi, a comprehensive aesthetic system based on austerity, simplicity and appreciation of the integrity of natural objects and processes. The Japanese garden functions as a secluded unit, far from the daily turmoil, governed by its own rules of space and volumes, accentuation and the properties of surfaces, of the ratio between ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’. In short, it comes down to ‘reducing data’ – quite an unusual concept in today’s world, driven by an insatiable appetite for information. It is just such a source of concentrated restraint that set out the parameters for Laidig’s work: a longing for ‘less’, a recognition of the vital connection between culture and nature, but above all the insight that everything deserves attentiveness. A reorientation towards the grid, what we might call an ‘anti- com- positional’ organizing principle, was undoubtedly one of the most notable strategies of the post-war neo-avant-garde. The essentialist language of the grid eliminated the narrative, the anecdotal and the highly personal, autobiographical element of painting. Precursors can be found in early twentieth-century painting, firstly in France and Russia, then in the Netherlands. A critical essay by American art historian Rosalind Krauss from the mid-1980s, questioning the ‘shelf life’ of avant-garde strategies such as the grid, lays bare what Sabine Laidig’s grids, like her triptych Cirrus (ink on wove paper, 2010), are not about. Grids are ‘flattened, geometricized, ordered, (...) anti-natural, anti-real’, writes Krauss: ‘It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.’1 In the context of Laidig’s work, Krauss’ characterization seems just as inappropriate as the assumed razor-sharp division between ‘cold’ abstraction and the ‘warm’ signature of a spontaneous and irrational kind of art, the polarity between what in the Nietzschean context is referred to as the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Art can be well-considered and devoid of coincidence, can even be based on mathematical models and still bear the warm trademark of its own materiality. If any- thing, Sabine Laidig’s works show us exactly that. 

A postcard in Laidig’s Berlin studio, a pen drawing in brown umber pigments by 17th century Dutch homo universalis Constantijn Huy- gens Jr. (1628 – 1697), provides us with some clues. In the Hofwijck Park shows the rural setting of Huygens’ country seat, not far from the Dutch city of Delft. A self-made colour chart, pasted to her studio wall just a step away, is exemplary for Laidig’s research into the properties of historic and contemporary pigments, in this particular case with Huygens’s pen drawing in umber as an inspirational point of departure. Pigment studies create the preconditions for Laidig’s work: the outcome of her research and the possibilities her materials offer are guidelines, and not the preconceived concept. It is a quality Laidig also recognizes in the work of Canadian born artist Agnes Martin (1912 – 2004): ‘The question is, is it concept, or has the concept dissolved. With Agnes Martin, it has.’ According to Laidig, to ‘just have an idea’ as an artist brings you nowhere. More important is what she calls 

Materialgerechtigkeit, doing justice to the inherent qualities of basic materials. Laidig honours the claims of natural substances to have an order and materiality particular to themselves. In that sense, her modus operandi seems a ‚distant relative’ of the ancient alchemical-derived concept of materia prima, the notion of a primal matter that holds the possibility of a genesis, of creation in the broadest sense of the word, deriving from the substance itself. 

This point is best illustrated by Laidig’s group of works with the alluring title Odore Aspergere. Drawings, presented in series, show us that her visual idiom moves between the sensory and a thorough investigation into the properties of colour and line. The fact that Laidig often works in polyptychs, as in the case of Odore Aspergere, has an instrumental reason. The variations in width of the spaces between the lines of her grids, drawn with painstaking precision, result in different tonalities of colour for each and every sheet, creating what Laidig calls ein stehender Klang, a sonorous and steady tone. These works go beyond experiments with form. More than that, it is the quality and the potential of her pigments that communicate, set free by a thoroughly calculated construction of lines. This is where ‘cold’ meets ‘warm’, where the ruler- drawn straight lines of the grid evoke a receptivity for the sensuous. But above all, they reduce the ‘speed of life’ by creating a silenced void that blurs our gaze. 

Precisely this aspect of Laidig’s work touches upon yet another widespread misconception about a non-representational, austere idiom of grids and lines, as in Chroma and Odore Aspergere: its as- sumed self-contained and closed character, doing ‘the job’ in spite of the viewer. The outcome of Laidig’s research into how isolated colour behaves, however, only functions in conjunction with the human eye: the aspect of sensibility comes not from the artist but from the interplay of materiality and the effect it has on the observer. Moving through her studio – or the exhibition space – makes one realize that Laidig’s cautiously dosed colours evoke simultaneous contrasts and a vibrating weightlessness, the suggestion of alternating horizontal and vertical lines and a sudden illusion of space, depending on the standpoint and how far one is removed from the work. Which gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘creator’. The essence of Laidig’s Chroma-series lays in a repetition of identical forms in pictorial space, thereby excluding compositional ‘highs and lows’ and the opinionated voice of the author. But the aspect of ‘democracy’ also lies in the active participation of the viewer, of including him or her in a silent game, as partner and agent in a communicative and image-forming process. Sabine Laidig manages to convey her knowledge and the pleasure of her Auseinandersetzungen, of her confrontations with mate- rials, to the viewer. Which makes it, more than solely an artist’s achievement, also the beholders delight. Her oeuvre displays, be- yond interpretation, a respect for tradition, handicraft and the potential of her materials. Acknowledging precisely these features, gives way to the core meaning of her work. 

TEXT ANTOON MELISSEN