ABSTRACT

Worringer’s art is abstract. It’s so, in the sense of the word as explained by the art theorist Wilhelm Worringer, who called it an art that represents the human longing for transcendence, basic rules, a search for forms. In art Wilhelm Worringer sees an abstraction of the world. In this sense, it’s a disembodiment of the body, a kind of spiritual/intellectual order of the sort developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their theory of the non-representational and the non-narrative. Christoph Worringer’s paintings demand that viewers see beyond what they see. The viewer’s eye should be used like a dissecting knife; it should question its own vision: Is what I’m seeing really what I’m seeing? Along with his trenchant paintings, the intensity of vision and experience demanded of the recipients of Worringer’s paintings conceals the object, extinguishing the original image and its reproduction, rejecting representation. Through their own vision, viewers can free themselves from their own personal, social, and cultural influences. Things disappear like smoke, as Kasimir Malevich said, and viewers can be outside of themselves; what is left is the ecstatic.