Ailleurs

Allieurs, a French word meaning “somewhere else”, is the title of a work that Weyermann created for an exhibition in Kunstraum Kreuzberg: Stipendiaten 1995–1997 featured artists who had received grants from the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft in that period. Weyermann’s artistic contribution was a walk-in installation comprising two rooms nested one within the other. While on the one hand it was a real space where the visitor was actually located, it was simultaneously a second, fictitious room. This second “imaginary” space is a fragment that is merely hinted at: “The viewer is positioned at specific spots in two spaces at the same time – in real space and “somewhere else”. This creates the feeling of being uncertain about their sense of space, or uncertainty about their position in the spaces.”¹
Weyermann elaborated on these reflections about “somewhere else” in a comprehensive series of works. Most of the paintings are executed using acrylic paint on paper and wood panel. Influenced by geometric patterns and perceptual confusions, they address issues of three-dimensional space on two-dimensional surfaces.
The artist’s engagement with concepts for visualising space and realising perspective delves far into the past of art historiography. Perspectival representations such as those found in medieval book illuminations and Persian/Indian miniature paintings, characterised by rich ornamentation, are the objects of Weyermann’s investigation, serving as visual references that she quotes in her abstract works for Ailleurs. While hierarchical proportion was used in miniature painting to convey a sense of hierarchy and narration, in the 16th century Leon Battista Alberti changed the visual language of spatial geometry such that it henceforth became possible to talk of perspective.
The interplay between various contradictory perspectives in a picture and the perceptual confusion this creates is an experimental field in Weyermann’s painting. Ailleurs is a series of works that leads into the first renderings. Her approach of creating virtual reconstructions based on construction plans for spaces that actually exist is precisely the obverse of the notion of spatial installations: three-dimensional space is transformed into two dimensions.

¹ Weyermann, Maja: Text from the artistic estate.