Selected Paintings

I’ve known the work of Annette Werndl for a long time. What had interested me about the painting Swinging Lights 1 (Mount Fuji) is the naturalistic imagery, a mountain. When I look at a painting, I ask: What should I look at? and What does it mean? First I see paint: paint on the surface, paint as a gesture and paint as an area. Then I see the mountain, which is also paint. I see paint on the mountain, and I see what could be a sky that is painted in various colors.
But when I look at the sky, it is more paint than sky. This dual role of color interests me. The paint is on the surface, and it is in the image. It is both at the same time. I consider this a metaphor for life. To portray, to present, to reveal, to confront: contradiction.
And in the end, I have to decide what I’m seeing and understanding. There has to be enough interest to make me reflect on what I’m seeing. And that interest is the presence of the materiality of the paint. The image is only a vehicle for the color and paint. Its materiality gives the painting power: the power to hold my attention. In the end is the question: Do I want to keep looking at the painting?
Identity is another point of interest. Annette’s paintings have a color scheme that is like a voice: identifiable. Her color is cool, and the resulting light depicted in the painting suggests depth. All her work has this color and light. The depth or pictorial space can be different. In this painting, I enter the pictorial space from the bottom and go to the top. The sky returns my focus back to me. So I enter the painting, have a visual experience with paint and a mountain, and return to myself and my thoughts about what I’ve experienced.
Then what does this painting mean, or is that important? Well, that’s what’s interesting: I have the impression that making this painting is the only important consideration. And it holds my attention. Being alive and interested is all that counts. This painting fulfills my expectations.

The paintings of Annette Werndl almost always feature many different colors, some very strong and occasionally applied across larger areas.
Still, they never seem to be a garish, dazzling confusion of colors. Instead, thanks to strong contrasts, her works take on a special radiance; her colors necessitate each other, as if in collaboration rather than competition.
Certain Abstract Expressionists lend atmospheric richness to their painting by reducing its coloring, narrowing the color spectrum, but Werndl follows an opposite, more difficult, approach. It takes courage to rely on many colors at once, and moreover to accept unfamiliar color combinations initially perceived to be inharmonious.
Only with great concentration and almost a composer’s sense of colors can a uniform resonance, a higher, more complex form of harmony, be produced above all the conflicting tonalities. Since Annette Werndl does so, her exquisitely balanced paintings can have an effect on an entire space as well as the people in it. And what else could better provide “support”?
But that’s not all. The “energy” Werndl speaks of is perceptible in her paintings. It is largely created as a result of her habit of painting in layers. Color emerges onto the surface from the lower layers; sometimes it is exposed by scratching off the layers above it. In this way the impression of depth and movement are created. Especially when intense colors make up the lower layers, it seems as if the whole painting is seething beneath the surface like a volcano. One thus senses a distinct dynamism and energy, and this can extend beyond the edges of the painting to charge a whole room.