Susanne S. D. Themlitz (Lisbon, 1968), an artist who trained in Portugal and Germany, became known at the beginning of the 1990s for her surprising personal imaginary full of allusions to everyday objects and to a fantasy world both artistic and literary. Unlike many of the Portuguese artists of her generation who drew very specific lines of work for themselves, she decided to combine elements from the two cultures that nourished her: fragment and synthesis, landscape and walking, chaos and order. This choice led her to relate to artists from preceding generations (Sigmar Polke, Thomas Schütte, Juan Muñoz), to become interested in seeking new forms of experiencing space, infusing her works with narratives, fictions, echoes, words and sounds, or with metamorphosis as a dimension, and to avoid the rigidity of sticking exclusively to matters of form.

Starting out on a small scale and using a pared-down, dense treatment, her first paintings, objects, collages, photographs and videos seduce, attract and provoke like children’s tales that conceal thorny relationships and hidden passions. As her body of works grew, it could be seen as a kind of landscape, an open, living thing, in transformation. We perceive whispers, distant footfalls, impossible conversations, echoes, germination and natural change. We sense the initial ideas of walking, observation and comment, in the manner of Robert Walser and Herberto Helder; the penetrating and probing gaze of Borges or Calvino; the playing with concepts of Baudelaire, and the resulting imaginary peeking out of which are the Grimm brothers, Lewis Carroll, medieval sagas, Tolkien, narratives containing changing dimensions, a transferral between worlds and the guises of reality and micro-narratives. Discussions in which stories are traced, the tale is guided along, the process is revealed but not rated or judged. Free of nostalgia, with an unwaveringly contemporary commitment.

Due to this setting and to championing the studio as a place where materials can reclaim their memory and set up relationships, thoughts are born that must be expressed in images. The central idea is sculpture, and nearby it, seeking it, is drawing like a sigh, a reference. Nothing dominates, everything interweaves to define surfaces, to inhabit the space – the paint is a gesture that suggests which way to go but neither delimits nor specifies, not covering the medium; it plays with being a fragment, a sketch, but never a final, finished image. Namely, the lines of bamboo and their shadows, real drawings in the air or on the wall, which are also a way to test the space, to approach it. The space as a notebook, a jotter in which drawings are a sea mist, colour is a whirlwind and the text is a sigh.

Everything is in contact and in transformation, awaiting the beholder’s curiosity. The forms arise from organic matter, but they are born in the ground, in nature. The figures are not fantasies or dreams, but rather imaginations: they enter our world, we find out they were already here and may have been watching us, consequently they bother us, they make us feel strange and send us into another reality.

These images, objects and installations by Susanne Themlitz evade certainty, suggesting a previous instant, an appearance or an escape. A world we have stumbled across by accident, that we see from another dimension.  It is not magma that stretches out: it is a walk, a landscape, an interplay of glances, an invitation to curiosity, a not being satisfied by the first image, a discovering of micro-worlds, reflections, open windows, holes that open into other realities. An ongoing, self-nourishing and unending narrative.

In contrast to artists who need white space, Susanne Themlitz deftly navigates though “impurities”, she even seems to seek them out. When she was pondering how her exhibition at MARCO should take shape, she wandered through the museum’s galleries, inner corridors and storerooms, she took the pulse (the mood even) of it all, as though it were a landscape that she was going to inhabit, to make hers. She was searching for features she could integrate into her project, bringing meaning to the dialogue, and avoiding imposition. The result is installations one can explore and the recreation of the archive, the studio and the storeroom to safeguard the artworks which, in their conversations, announce the next, inviting us to decipher, like in Baudelaire’s poem, “the language of flowers and silent things”.

Susanne Themlitz invites us to repeatedly ask ourselves what is hidden, what is behind, concealed and prior: the conch shell as a memory of what it contained, the outer cast of a bronze sculpture as an imprint and an object, the magnifying glass that unveils a world hidden in the barely perceptible, the lines that imply directions. It is not a question of reproducing reality but of acting in it, of taking it as a landscape that can be modified. Something is on the verge of happening before our eyes, as long as we keep them open. It is a question of wanting to see.

Miguel Fernández-Cid, exhibition curator