Page 17 - Studio International - August 1965

Resin on canvas 1964
80 x 74 cm.

by way· of increasing abstraction, to a graphically unrelated materials, goes beyond the traditional bounds
trellised form structure in which echoes of Cubism are between painting and plasticity. The frontiers between
traceable. 'Space-plan' pictures follow, in which the the two categories become fluid, a completely new and
motif of the town, or rather 'townscape' appears often unexpected approximation to the amorphous
transformed in a dense network of mutually super­ forms of Nature emerges. Dahmen's pictures from that
imposed forms and lines. The pictorial means are period of pioneering break-through are, in their
ever more absolutely imposed, the motif sinks behind surfaces, reminiscent of dilapidated walls, crusty earth,
pictorial form scaffolding, and finally, the process is decayed bark, petrified lava or porous tufaceous
reversed: the starting point is independent of the limestone. But graphic patterns are always the basis,
subject, is concerned only with the free play of creative which tear up, cleave, accentuate the colour structure.
means. Colour becomes the predominant working . Strangely dyeing colours like rust-red, brown-gold,
material, it imposes itself independently as colour­ yellow ochre, ash-grey predominate in Dahmen's
form, its layers, thrown into viscous relief, forming unusually differentiated palette. His torn-up depths
organic excrustations. Clefts and ravines weave over often gleam with mysteriously glittering tones like
the surface of the picture and we get those 'earth-crust quartz and rock. Viscous structure and colourful
pictures' and 'terrestrial formations' for which Dahmen intensity interpenetrate.
became famous. The pictorial event is stamped with the Then there are paintings which are suggestive of
earthy, with stuff, substance, stuff as the maternal in exotic bark paintings, the ornaments of West African
the literal sense, as first cause of all life. tribes or the masks and men's houses of the Sepik. Here
Such a process of 'material painting', even enlisting the effect of the colours is still more veiled and muted,
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