Reflections on some paintings by Eva Paulin

„I paint to see and understand.“ This is how Eva Paulin very succinctly describes her working method. At first sight it makes perfect sense, but there‘s actually something strange about it. Logically, you‘d expect it to say: I look to understand, and what I‘ve understood, I paint. Looking to understand, and only then painting. That would be the logical order. But that‘s not what it says. It begins with painting. Before painting, the painter doesn‘t see. The act of painting occurs primarily to see. To give the painter eyes, or to open her or his eyes. In any case, to make something appear. The understanding comes later. First comes the painting, then the seeing, and only then the understanding, the language, the connections, the meanings, the codes, the culture...

Seeing precedes understanding and is never completely replaced by understanding. There is always an untranslated and untranslatable rest. Literally: a rest for which there is no language. There is an irresolvable tension between seeing and understanding. Every evening we see the sun set. We know it doesn‘t really do so. The sun doesn‘t set. The earth revolves around the sun, and for a part of the earth, the sun becomes invisible at a certain moment because the earth is moving away from the sun. We know this. We understand this. Yet, the sun sets for us every evening. We see this with our own eyes. The sun sets. Below the horizon. That horizon is our limit of vision. It is the line that defines the landscape of our vision. What goes below it disappears, and we no longer see it. We orient ourselves in relation to that horizon. With our eyes, we determine our place in the world, long before we understand that place and can put it into words. In the case of this example, the words remain connected to what we see. We still say, even though we know better, that the sun sets and rises again the next morning. Because that‘s how we see it.

The relationship between what we see and what we can understand and express is never entirely clear. Love lyrics are probably the best example of this gap. Seeing the beloved has an intensity that cannot be fully captured in words, that transcends or exceeds concept. Only physical touch can bridge this gap, at least for a while. In that touch, the word is erased. It is rendered inaudible and distilled into a sigh or silence, a scream or a moan. Is there a connection between touching and painting? Literally: if the canvas is skin, then the brush is like a finger, like a hand that touches the skin, makes it tremble, and leaves a trace. And isn‘t looking itself—a certain way of looking, a certain gaze—a form of touching? We are touched by the gaze of the others. They touch us with indifference, with hostility, with tenderness... and leave a trace on our skin. The gaze of the other is inscribed on our body.

Perhaps all arts are ways of touching? With a brush, with a chisel, with a pen, with a musical instrument, with a body... Touch is a vibration of the skin. Resonances. The skin stands for sensitivity, permeability and vulnerability. It is a surface on which the world inscribes itself, with care and affection or with pain and suffering. The stage, the paper, the canvas,... all the surfaces on which art is produced are made of skin.

Of course, the painter sees something before he paints. Eva Paulin gives us explicit insight into her working process by displaying on her website a number of pictures that inspired her. Most of them are pictures taken (by herself) from nature: trees, branches, clouds, reflections of the sun,.. But there are also pictures taken from urban environments and even from destruction and rubble. What do pictures of something as immaterial as clouds and as material as a demolished house have in common? That they produce forms, shapes, lines, colours and surfaces, the consequence of unexpected interactions between elements of nature (trees, flowers, branches, leaves,..) and parts of a building (a broken down wall, a window, a ruin,...). These pictures are constellations that unintentionally appear and that show a trace of a vision before understanding and before words.

Seeing never fully translates into understanding. But seeing also encounters its own boundary: the boundary of the invisible. That which eludes the eye, yet has touched it. In its retreat, the invisible has left a trace in the eye, a memory that can no longer be found, yet cannot be erased. A trace of what? A memory of what? Where do these traces or memories reveal themselves? In interstices. In undefined tensions. Between painting and title, between image and word. The titles of Eva Paulin‘s paintings are sometimes concrete, sometimes abstract. The naming of the paintings moves between three languages: English, French, and German. Each language has its own idiom, a residue untranslatable in another language. In this sense, we all live, always, „lost in translation.“ Forced to translate, aware of its inadequacy. But multiplying languages is also opening up new perspectives, creating more interstices, more imaginations. The alternation of large and small paintings in this oeuvre is also not without significance. Aside from the subjects covered, this alternation already points to a tension between the intimate, the lyrical, the subjective, and the epic, the objective, the narrative. Two ways of seeing, two ways of touching.

All art is the result of a touch on a skin (canvas, paper, stone, stage,...) What kind of touch is needed today? Modernist and avantgardist art were often made with a hard touch: provocative, aggressive, critical, shocking, looking for the disruption, the fragmentation and the destruction of beauty and tradition. Sublime it was called or more often ‘unheimlich’, uncanny. Modernist thinkers and artists dismissed beauty. They exiled Venus, to use the American art historian Wendy Steiner’s well known phrase. Traumatized by war, economic depression, and bewildering social and technological change, they created impersonal, autonomous, self-referential works that avoided pleasing or gratifying their audience. Abstraction was the most obvious expression of this formal imperative, and alienation its mindset. They refused the bourgeois charm of „flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello,“ as Barnett Newman stated in 1967. Disdained by avant-garde artists, beauty and its major symbols of art became modernist taboos.

That demolition work was necessary at a certain point in history, but it has become a dead end and has degenerated into nihilism. For some art critics the end of this modern art is almost a fact. For Steiner, the 20th century is the century of ‚autonomous‘ art, which she calls ‚sublime‘. For her, the 21st century, on the other hand, will be the century of ‘heteronomous art’, which she associates with ‚the beautiful‘. In her vision, the sublime stands for devastating, disturbing and alienating art that does not want recognition from a specific audience or community, while the beautiful stands for communication, comfort, openness and dialogue with the world and the public. Steiner argues that the experience of beauty is a form of communication, a subject-object interchange in which finding someone or something beautiful is at the same time recognizing beauty in oneself.

In Steiner’s theory of beauty as “a special interaction between a person and something else” there is a strong focus on the female experience. By discovering their taste—whether for an object or another person—women forge their sense of identity. It’s a shift from rationalism to emotion and pleasure: I think, therefore I am becomes I like, therefore I am. Steiner has traced that idea back over a thousand years, through myriad women writers, artists, and characters. Around the year 1000, for instance, a Japanese lady-in-waiting catalogued everything she liked and disliked in The Pillow Book. She even reflected on her own preoccupation with taste, writing: “If I can spread out a finely woven, green straw mat and examine the white bordering with its vivid black patterns, I somehow feel that I cannot turn my back on this world, and life actually seems precious to me.” What is challenging about this observation is that the straw mat is described by the Japanese woman almost like an autonomous abstract painting! Maybe beauty was not a totally forgotten category in modernism after all.

In her work, Eva Paulin engages in dialogue with the modernist tradition. The Kiss (2023) is an explicit reference to Gustav Klimt‘s work of the same name. The overwhelming, almost suffocating energy of the male figure leaning over the female is replaced by two intertwined bodies in light colors, surrounded—embraced—by yellow lines that intersect across the canvas. Intersecting lines—wires, veins, tubes, intestines, cords, pipes, etc.—appear in many of Eva Paulin‘s paintings: simultaneously organic and inorganic, like a dense network connecting everything to everything.

The discussion about the contrast between a subversive and an affirmative art should not make us forget that it is important that art retains its quality of ‚un-measure‘ (a term coined by the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno): an ‚un-measure‘ that continually questions and challenges the ‚measure‘ of code, convention and culture. However, it is crucial to interpret the ‚un-measure‘ of art more broadly than the provocative, subversive and nihilistic gesture of avant-garde art. In that sense the search for what a word like ‘beauty’ stands for today could be an ‘un-measure’ contrasting the disrupting ecological, economical, social… catastrophes surrounding us.

“Many have become thinner-skinned due to the increasing horror news of the wars that constantly reaches us”, explains Eva Paulin in an interview. Also here the image of the skin is essential and the idea that it became thinner because of the confrontation with a complicated, often aggressive and threatening outside world. Our skin is our ultimate protection against and our most important organ for communication with the outside world. If our skin gets thinner or thicker we are in danger of becoming too vulnerable or too indifferent.

„Love is the profoundly difficult realization that something other than oneself is real,“ says British author and philosopher Iris Murdoch. The concept of ‚love‘ plays a remarkable role in her ethical thinking. The gaze is crucial in this. She advocates for an „attentive, loving, and just look“ at reality. This, she argues, is what morality primarily demands of us. She offers a mundane, yet highly illuminating and well-known example. Murdoch describes a woman who is hostile to her daughter-in-law, whom she considers insufficiently refined, vulgar, and somewhat childish. Yet, the mother-in-law always behaves very appropriately toward her daughter-in-law. She doesn‘t act on her negative thoughts. Everything that follows plays out in the mother‘s mind. She is an intelligent woman who dares to question her own judgment. She no longer wants to be a prisoner of her own prejudices. Carefully and impartially, she casts a new glance at her daughter-in-law and sees a simple, spontaneous, and cheerful girl. This coming into contact with the world outside us, beyond our preconceptions and representations—beyond the cave as Plato described it—is a lifelong process of growth toward moral perfection. Eva Paulin puts it this way: „My perception, its transience, and the meaning of perception itself are the main themes of my artistic research. Perception is intimately linked to my value system.“

Cartographie de l’invisible (2025) is the telling title of a recent painting by Eva Paulin. Poetic and paradoxical. The invisible cannot be mapped. It is not a world that corresponds to longitude and latitude coordinates, not a surface that can be recorded by a surveyor. And yet, this invisibility is translated into a frame, into shapes and colors, into a „map.“ The predominant color is blue—the sea?—which takes on green and darker hues as it rises—the land? Small circles manifest themselves throughout the painting—eyes? Eyes are also very prominent in the equally recent series Augen des universum (2025). Planets as eyes that watch us. The strongest appeal of a work of art has been described by Rainer Maria Rilke in his well known and often quoted poem Archaic Torso of Apollo. The poet is walking in a museum and has the experience of being looked at by a torso, a headless sculpture of the Greek god Apollo. The poem ends with the famous lines: ”for here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life.” (“denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.”) Perhaps this also ties in on another level with a comment Martha Nussbaum made about Iris Murdoch‘s example of the woman and her daughter-in-law: “I think that there is something more to loving vision than just seeing. There is, for example, a willingness to permit oneself to be seen. There is also a willingness to stop seeing, to close one’s eyes before the loved one’s imperfections. There is also a willingness to be, for a time, an animal or even a plant, relinquishing the sharpness of creative alertness before the presence of a beloved body.” It is not just about looking, but also about the willingness to be looked at, and even about the ability not to look and to withdraw our gaze… How can a painter not look and still see?

Murdoch‘s ethics counter the cynical and ironic attitude to life that characterizes our times. Her understanding of love involves responsibility and care for the concrete other and for reality as a whole. Art plays an important role in this for her. Murdoch distinguishes between art that satisfies our „fantasy“ and art that stimulates our „imagination.“ In the former, she argues, we remain within the circle of ourselves, of our „thick ego,“ while in the latter, we connect with the world and with other lives. It is, of course, this second dimension that she is concerned with. Selflessly paying attention to what nature has to offer, a simple walk in the woods, is an exercise in learning to love and therefore an exercise in moral self-improvement.

It‘s no coincidence that the vast majority of Eva Paulin‘s paintings stem from such simple walks—the many photographs attest to this—and from the selfless observation of what presents itself. They are exercises in looking. Exercises in loving vision. Exercises in moral self-improvement. Exercises in revealing that hidden network that connects everything. As in this statement by Eva Paulin, which brings together all the important words: “The reality of beauty is as invisible as breath. My artistic work is first for myself and then it touches others. I want to convey my love for the invisible things in life. I want to draw attention to the value of subjective perception. Images form the essence of my belief in beauty and goodness. Each image is a piece of my conviction that life is valuable and worth living. In my search for the meaning of life, I want to invite others to share the magic of my imaginary image spaces.”

Beauty, love, responsibility, care,... these are big, loaded, and therefore elusive, perhaps even untimely words, but isn‘t that the „un-measurement“ we need right now? And what if we replaced the word „magic“ with the word „politics“?The German filmmaker Wim Wenders defines the task of the artist as follows: “The most important political decision you make is where you direct people‘s eyes. In other words, what you show them, day in and day out, is politics.”

Erwin Jans

Dramaturgist