Franz Schuh

Excerpt from the foreword to the catalogue Dimensions of the Surface:

Dimensions: Associations with the Work of Nita Tandon

[…] The visual arts are literally about the visual, but also about educating. ‘Artist, fashion! Talk not long!’ was Goethe’s invocation to poets. We can also simply take it as an instruction to work in an appropriate fashion with the language, the material of poetry, in other words on no account opulently. In this respect the brittle aspect of Nita Tandon’s works is a mark of quality. Her works do not proffer themselves to the viewer in a dazzling display of splendour or gimmickry. The old [German] word bilden [to build, but also to establish, to educate] refers to the artistic work, the bringing forth of an artefact, and Tandon’s way of bringing forth is planned and constructive, in other words not intuitive or, in the trivial sense, ‘artistic’ – that is, consciously uncontrolled. These works also highlight the question of what role the act of thinking plays in artistic works, whether, for instance, it is there before the art object or whether it only emerges and forms itself through its existence. It was to do with this act of thinking that Nita Tandon (who studied under Maria Lassnig at the University of Applied Arts Vienna) opted not to paint any pictures – any pictures that represented ‘something’. With Tandon, opting to turn away from the mimetic is a well-thought-out process, one which has resulted in the consequences previously discussed: if no picture, then no colours either, nothing painted by hand. The colour comes from the material and is therefore not applied by the artist.

Indeed, that is the lesson the visual arts teach us. For the visual arts the surface is essential, and the metaphor of ‘superficiality’ inspired by the surface is belied by the visual arts. In keeping with the ‘dimensions of the surface’, Nita Tandon’s work is not least about these questions: What makes an image an image? How does it define itself within the space from which it stands out? But a space with which it must also co-operate in order to be seen as an image in the first place? Questions such as these are not academic; rather, they are stored in our perception, and when I see Nita Tandon’s art, I have a dual experience of art: on the one hand, through Tandon’s detachment from the immediacy with which she does not allow ‘the image’ to be predetermined in its function; on the other, this very detachment creates a new type of immediacy, one that captivates and delights me as a viewer.