Irma Blank

After about ten years of Trascrizioni, a great uneasiness heralded change. I began to be interested in the interpersonal relationship: between you and me, the tension, the propensity towards others. I needed an extensive, radical sign, in tension between two poles, the beginning and the end, full and empty, birth and death. The tension towards fulfillment.

Experiments convinced me that only the brush could be the right tool. With the flat brush I went slowly, with extreme concentration, from edge to edge, from left to right, from full to empty, without stopping.

I worked vertically, always at eye level. For the large works I had built a climbing system and supports to climb, first me and then the work. The large size represented the great challenge. As the size increased, I realized that the extension of the sign responded to exhalation. These two movements were inextricably linked, the body involvement was total. Synthesis between mind and body.

The limit imposed by the breath was 130 centimeters, doubled in the diptych, giving the maximum base measure of the great diptychs, Schriftzug = Atemzug [Writing = Breath] (1982-1995). Each time it was an adventure, an unknown, a crossing of life, repeated, suffered and rejoiced, with traces of minimal events, such as slight hesitations in proceeding, imponderable differences in the pressure of the hand, irregularities in the texture of the canvas.

In joining the two canvases of the diptych, turning the second part, I obtained the dark shadow in the center, the beginning of the path of signs, the birth, the fullness, a shadow that refers to the open book, the entry into the book, the book of life.

Although I have used tools that historically belong to painting, I never thought of painting. My gestures always belong to the writing procedures. I investigated the abyss of the self, the individual and collective archive of the past and present.

By writing I questioned the world, the noise of the world. I chose my tools without prejudice, according to the need, from pencil to pen, from brush to ballpoint pen, from ink to china, from pastel to watercolor, from acrylic to oil. I wrote by hand and digitally.

It was different with the color. Two colors stand out: pink, but above all blue.

Pink is the color of identification, orientation, analysis and waiting, I used it in all its shades in the first phase of the Radical Writings.

Then blue entered the scene – decisive, peremptory. It is the color of ink, of infinity, of utopia. It is the color of writing par excellence and is condensed in the artist’s book Ur-Buch ovvero Romanzo Blu from 1997, with a body of blue tissue paper sheets. It is the triumph of blue, recalling all the ink spilled over the centuries. It opens to the immensity of spaces, to infinity.

Irma Blank

It is in this context of cultural and linguistic uprooting that she has developed her asemantic writing, conceived as an extension of herself, as a way of exploring and crossing time, while attesting to her own existence. A writing that, over the years, and despite being in dialogue with the contemporary experiences of visual poetry and conceptual art, has maintained its own individuality.

In the constant vaporization of the distinction between meaning and signifier, between sign, sound and image, Blank’s writing has also expanded its boundaries to extend into actions in public space or performative events, such as readings and sound works.

All Blank’s works can be considered self-portraits, starting with the Eigenschriften, made between 1968 and 1973, described by the artist as “a journey into my self, a journey into the world of interrogations that lacked the answers, a form of diary, written by me, intended for me”.

Starting from the 1980s, the action of writing is conceived in relation to the time of breath. In Radical Writings, the pink, violet and blue scriptural signs are drawn with the brush on the canvas from left to right, and each trace is equivalent to the time of breath.

The sign is constantly revitalized through energies or limitations of the body, as in the Gehen Second Life cycle which began in 2017, when due to a stroke that immobilized the right side of her body, Blank learnt to draw with her left hand and traced lines on transparent paper in single or double pages with blue, black or red felt-tip pens to give rhythm to the sheet with a writing motion.

“As always, there is first a lack, a suffering, and from there the creative gesture is born – so Blank – Now I have a very different relationship with what I do: before this block I have always gone from the inside towards the outside, I always thought of the hand instrument going towards the others. Now I think about the foot, the earth, the space to go through. For a year and a half I have been calling all my new works Gehen, Second Life: in these works I move again, I live the act of going.”

Lara Conte