Thorsten Goldberg’s artistic cumulus research
Matthias Reichelt
Who has never wanted to let themselves fall from a great height into the promising fluffy and enormously soft featherbed of a sea of clouds while flying in bright sunshine? That would be a leap into an airy “nothingness” that would in no way slow down the free fall, because clouds are just warm humidity rising into colder climes. Condensed water that docks onto dirt particles in the air. As sober as these facts are, the aesthetics arouse emotions. The ultimate in the phenomenology of clouds, star and grace at the same time, is the cumulus cloud. Of course, this works precisely in the dialectic of blue sky and sparsely seeded clouds or even just a single magnificent specimen. Moved by aerodynamics, it floats above the monochrome blue background of the sky, seemingly composed of baroque-rounded elements. The cumulus cloud is a loner, blasé and narcissistic, it wants no competition and “the stage” all to itself.
There are cloud painters in art, the most famous being the Briton John Constable (1776-1837), whose romantic landscapes have found their way into industrial poster and puzzle production as motifs.
Centuries after Constable, Thorsten Goldberg, who has been involved in art in public spaces for a long time, takes on the cumulus cloud, without, of course, intending to depict it in a natural way in the original context. Instead, he is exclusively interested in the bare fact of the form itself and takes a completely different artistic path. He detaches the cloudy structure from its celestial context, configuring it in a fantastically surreal “downsizing” into a sparrow-sized object. In the seemingly naturalistic and wonderful ballpoint pen sketches “Cloud in my hand” (2010-2012), the object lies on his own hand, between his thumb and forefinger, so that he can carefully study it from all sides. A self-reflexive process that is, on the one hand, a partial self-portrait and, on the other, an investigative approach to the cumulus cloud.
With this series of idiosyncratic self-portraits, Goldberg draws on Albrecht Dürer, who drew his hands in many variations, with quiet irony. On a drawing from 1508, he showed the left hand of God, a bullet firmly in his grasp. A game with proportions that Goldberg also plays with his cumulus cloud. Once the form has been made manageable and explored, he begins to transform the baroque curves into a small sculpture as an edition in porcelain, the outer shell of which is perforated to prevent it from collapsing in the kiln. The holes give the object a completely different appearance, abstracted from the cumulus form.
At the end of the study of this species of cloud is a perfectly white sculpture made of GRP (3 x 2 x 2 m), which is installed at a height of 5.80 meters above the villa of the Herbert-Gerisch-Foundation. Goldberg had already created variations of the cumulus shape in advance using LED light and acrylic bars for various locations and even had a version hovering over a waterway in Lippstadt. The reflected image as a chimera comes closest to the reality of the cumulus cloud as an almost material nothingness, thus completing a circle.