Rebecca LittleJohn interviewed Paul Rotterdam for AUSTRIA KULTUR on the occasion of his exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock , 1995.

The Speed of Light

RLJ:  With respect to the speed of light, how fast do paintings travel ?

PZR :  Painting is the art of the finest feelings. Feelings travel as fast as light itself. It is at 

least theoretically possible that the entire message of the painting is contained in the 

emotion evoked in the moment of first encounter. 

RLJ:  You often occupy your space with something that keeps me out of your depth.

May I approach you?

PZR: The space in my paintings is not the kind you expect in illusionist easel painting. In the 

1970’s it was mostly a void. In the eighties, when I began to fall in love with certain

particular structures or events in nature, the space became perhaps less objective, more 

celestial, occupied by elements which made of the work a nature all of its own. Often I

keep you out by physical elements which act as barriers or guards and I draw you into

the space through your increased desire to transcend immediacy.

RLJ:  I nibble and chew on you as I go. You make stations to precipitate my gulf. Must I 

interpret your moves or is a rose a rose ?

PZR: The greatest artists always had the greatest insights into art. An artist cannot hide in the 

fog of subjectivity and pure emotionalism without knowing the premises on which his

art should be built. Not everything is possible at all times. The appreciation of works of 

art is not the taking of a sensuous bath in warm stimuli, but the complete 

consummation of an act of looking at the various alternatives the work is presenting 

while alluding to other alternatives of procedure.

RJL:  You trip me up holding space in one hand and depth in another. Is there a bridge

across ?

PZR: The depth of a painting is not identical with its space. I would like to conceive of depth 

as an emotional gravity or something which leads deep into zones of yet unexplored

consciousness. 

RLJ: The deeper region of a painting will be the center of focus. After everything else is 

built, in these regions you practice true painting. Is there method to absolutism ? 

PZR : I am not trying to depict any particular reality in my work . The sublime totality of the 

work itself is the actual reality of art. I long for the intangible and the mysterious in 

nature which will find itself in the created object. There you don’t see depicted 

concepts but an emotionally charged visual environment which arose from an inner 

vision about the essence of the visible world and the new state into which the art of 

painting needed to be pushed.

RLJ:  Strip painting of qualities and the proposition dies mortal. Is that the reason you

protect exposed areas ?

PZR:  Quality derives from the success of a painting to demonstrate the importance of its 

propositions. Abstract art should be an invention of formlessness which strains

imagination to its limits. The unity of pictorial elements accounts for the work’s  

specific structural identity. It reveals the workings of a single soul and the object in its 

transparency conveys a spiritual content. It shows the striving of a consciousness into 

a territory which is its own possession.

RLJ:  You handle three-dimensionally with the tactics of a traditional landscape painter. Do 

I need shoes ?

PZR: Already in the beginning of the 20th century abstract painters became aware that a 

form that represents nothing outside itself is strictly speaking a physical , three-

dimensional element that affects the ontological status of what a painting can be.

Regardless in what physical form a painting may appear, you will not need shoes but

eyes to travel the expanse of possible spaces in art, from the most intimate and direct

physical form, over the space of mountains and clouds into the distances of heaven

and the remotest corners of hell.

RLJ:  You wander in the pathos of myth long depicting it.

PZR:  The night-rainbow, I mean the depiction of the night bow, took ten years of boiling in 

my head before I was able to paint it. Friedrich had sent me a night bow in the sky 

after I had given a lecture on his night bow painting. But then there was the “Lost 

Love” series that broke up and started all over again for the past 15 years. The 

“Broken Tree” series was an intense mourning over death.

RLJ: An animal central to life in the pen of the unicorn dies. Will myth die?

PZR:  Myth moves like a cloud into the spiritual workings of mankind to provide 

refreshment from barren logic. The rational, when thirsting for the irrational, produces

a truth larger than what can be deducted from the physical world and creates meaning 

from seemingly unrelated events.