Pulse, Cut & Spray.
On Manfred Neuwirth's Iceland works

Manfred Neuwirth's recent works are about simple things. About water and black sand, the encroaching sea, the soft din of the wind, and the rush of the waves, somewhere in a forlorn part of Iceland, where he evokes a stage that can do away with human beings (and always could). A theatre of nature that has existed for billions of years: the counter currents and overlapping movements of the spray, and the undercurrent pulling the water back from the shoreline into the vast expanse of the North Atlantic.

At particular, exactly defined sites, Neuwirth takes the pulse of the sea; in fourfold slow motion he shows the eternally recurring cycle of flow and ebb: uproar and repose caught up in an endless loop. The digital image is presented in portrait format, a wide screen scenario rotated by 90º. In this view the sea is not moving from left to right, but hits the shore from top to bottom, creating the impression of an artificial ebb petering out toward the bottom edge of the screen. And this is not only repeated time and again, but it is – naturally – each time different, non-systematic, and aleatoric.

While ebbing the current is ripped open upward, revealing sudden gaps before abruptly thinning out. The moving image of the video installation finds its parallel in a concomitant series of photographs that freezes the oceanic movements into stills. Only then their succession, read as it were in minimal time steps and cuts, conveys the illusion of movement.

The images thus created were patiently scouted and prepared, before being filmed and photographed on the shores of Reynisfjara and Kirkjufjara in the remote south of the island state, in the summer of 2014 and 2015. The takes are set between soft fade-ins and fade-outs, immersed in surround sound, literally celebrating the myriads of shades of white flashing up from the milky-foamy, glistening mix of air and water in their elemental decolouration. Manfred Neuwirth's trademark method – a radical reduction of narration and image content, while simultaneously retaining a soaring amplification of its sensorial impact – is spot on for this sujet: One's perception is sharpened; one experiences the beauty of innumerable details that constitute an everyday, seemingly insignificant natural phenomenon; one is delighted by the fact to actually not be sensually overwhelmed. The paradoxical gain of aesthetic abundance from the 'paucity' of the simple, the spartanic, is clearly owed to the precision of Neuwirth's eye.

One has to give Neuwirth credit for both formal and pictorial mastery and dramaturgic refinement: The sublime moment of the screen (just short of) being filled up by the waves of the fizzy flood advancing represents this project's highlight, defined by being set at the exact interface between representation and abstraction. Nonetheless, it is an almost naïve, child-like eye that pervades these works, a focused contemplation without the need for an arduous detour via hermeneutics, or an 'interpretation' of these images and sounds in order for them to be (at least from a distance) comprehended. As said before, in his works Neuwirth is dealing with quite simple things – yet also with the mysterious variety of forms, i.e., the infinite complexities concealed within this simplicity.

Stefan Grissemann