wall paintings:

Museum Wittelsbacher Schloß Friedberg / GER
Bürohaus TBits.net GmbH in Alfdorf bei Schwäbisch Gmünd / GER
Fa. CNW Augsburg / GER
Outside The Box, Augsburg / GER
Europäisches Patentamt Munich / GER
PAN, Praxisklinik Cologne / GER
Tanzstudio No Limit Berlin / GER
Technisches Rathaus Chemnitz, Postbank Cologne / GER
Grundschule Günzburg / GER
Haus Wacker Munich / GER
Haus Seerose Munich / GER

painting on ceilings:

Privatvillen Munich / GER
PAN Klinik Cologne/ GER
Moschee Tuttlingen (Projekt)/ GER

metal reliefs:

Berufsfeuerwehr Krefeld/ GER
Hafenamt Cologne / GER
Mc Kinsey Cologne / GER
Berufsschule Augsburg

glas and ceramics:

Römermuseum Xanten / GER
Ernst&Young Munich / GER
Karstadt Gütersloh / GER
Urnenwand Friedhof Marxheim

carpets:

Museum Wittelsbacher Schloß Friedberg / GER
Kulturzentrum Gasteig Munich / GER
Moschee London / GB

art for public places:

Olympisches Dorf Munich / GER

exhibitions booths:

Heim- und Handwerk Munich / GER
Sondershow ORNAMENT, Intern. Handwerksmesse Munich / GER
Maltzahn Carpets+Orac+Omexco, Orgatec Cologne / GER
Domotex Hannover Maltzahn Carpets, Hausmesse
Brillux Münster, Farbe Cologne / GER
Callwey, Inter. trading Munich / GER
Buchmesse Frankfurt CH Beck Verlag
Bauhow Munich / GER
Umwelt 83 Nürnberg / GER

(a selection)

ZKM Karlsruhe / GER
Forum Landsberger Allee Berlin / GER
Ernst &Young Frankfurt a.M / GER.
Emprise Hamburg / GER
Booz, Allen & Hamilton Frankfurt / GER
Metron Düsseldorf / GER
Mayersche Hofkunst Munich / GER
Claytec Boisheim / GER
McKinsey, Cologne / GER

Ornamental Art

Thomas Weil’s synthetic access

by  Heinz Schütz

Above the art and architecture of modernism is the verdict: No ornament! Adolf Loos is repeatedly quoted as a key witness for the banishment in his pamphlet “Ornament and Crime”. It was written in 1908, at a time when ornament was rampant on Wilhelminian and Art Nouveau products, and despite, or rather because of its polemic, it is still refreshing to read today. Loos wrote sentences like: “Evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of the ornament from the object of use. (2) Or: “the modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate. if a tattooed person dies in freedom, he has just died a few years before he committed murder.” (3) And: “But whoever goes to the ninth symphony and then sits down to draw a wallpaper pattern is either a criminal or a degenerate.” “We have the art that replaced ornament. (5)

With the help of exaggerated exaggerations, Loos brings the rejection of ornament that is circulating in modernity to provocative short formulas. He justifies it with the premises of modernism: an evolutionary model of progress, at the forefront of which is Western modernism, and the autonomy of art, which refuses to be decoration. At the same time, he refers back to a modern, no-frills attitude to life that is characterized by purposeful rationality and economy.

The spell that lies on the ornament is broken in the post and postal modernity. If one of Loosse’s assertions were to be applied to the present, a large part of society with its fashion-conscious tatoo wearers would be suspected of crime. At the latest in the transition from modernism to postmodernism – the borderline is difficult to define – ornaments and ornamental elements related to ornamentation appear in design, architecture and art, for example in the design drafts of Studio Alchimia, Memphis or Ettore Sottsass In art, ornamental elements are taken up in the European Neo-Geo and American Pattern Painting of the seventies/eighties, and even in Minimalism there are structures that at least challenge comparison with ornamental constructions, not to mention earlier approaches in Constructivism and Concreteism.

Thomas Weil is one of the vehement advocates of the ornament who specifically – and certainly also in the name of modernism – advocates its rehabilitation. His interest in ornament awakened early on, at the age of fifteen, and he has been dealing with it historically, theoretically and practically as an architect, designer and artist for over half a century. Ornaments can be realized in different materials and on different objects, respectively artifacts, across genres and disciplines. Thomas Weil’s will to cross disciplinary boundaries is already evident during his architecture studies in the sixties, when he does not limit himself to his subject architecture, but also works on collages and ready-mades.

Because the practical and constructive use of the ornament begins in the early seventies. As an architect, he participated in the construction of the Olympic Village in Munich with a focus on “play program and art” and used ornaments for floor design on a large scale. Together with Hans Zeitler, he designed colorful interiors in the mid-seventies and began designing carpet, velour and fabric collections in the eighties. This was followed by designs for the ornamentalisation of existing buildings and the realisation of large ornaments as “art in architecture”. As far as Weil’s art is concerned, after an extremely short phase of “figurative painting”, as he calls it, the ornamentation flows into his installations, steles and pictures. In recent years, he has concentrated particularly on ornamental painting.

In his search for points of reference and starting points for Weil’s work on ornament, we should once again refer to the fifteen-year-old, who is fascinated by a book about the architecture of the Seljuks in Konya. For Weil, the Islamic cultural sphere is and will remain a decisive source for his own work. In the mid-seventies, he travelled to Spain, Egypt and Persia, in particular to study the ornamental architecture in Isfahan, Cairo and the Alhambra. In 1976 a fire station designed by him with newly developed ornaments was built in the Persian Shustar. In 1985 he receives a guest lectureship on Islamic ornamentation in Cairo. Last but not least, the painting of Marie Luise Heller, the second wife of his father Ernst Weil – also an artist – is said to have had a contact with Islamic “Eastern art”. Heller’s objects and painting move at the intersection of Hardedge, Op-Art and signal painting. Thomas Weil, who admires Heller’s work, influences them with his preference for Islamic ornamentation. He also supports the curator of the major exhibition “World Cultures and Modern Art” responsible for the Islamic department with his knowledge and sources. In the World Cultures exhibition, Heller’s objects then serve as evidence of the undogmatic contact between modernism and Islamic architectural ceramics. (6)

If one assumes the banishment of the ornament in western modernity, the Islamic cultural circle with its millennia-old appreciation of the ornament represents a cultural antipole: In Western Modernism, the autonomous image displaces the ornament, despised as decoration, from art. In Islamic culture, before Western Modernism asserted its influence, ornament was placed above the mimetically functioning image in connection with calligraphy. The turning away from the mimetic in Western art brings both poles a little closer, and yet this does not change the modern contempt for the ornament, which is, so to speak, already in the name – ornare = to equip, to decorate, to adorn. The reduction of the ornament to mere decoration fails to recognise the magical-cultural, spiritual and social significance that ornament has had in the past and especially in non-Western cultures.

The result of Thomas Weil’s intensive examination of Islamic ornamentation and his intention to re-equip it for modernity, so to speak, is found in the Ornament Book (7), published together with Claudia Weil. In an analytical recourse to the geometric foundations of Islamic ornamental construction, Thomas Weil develops not only complex ornaments, but also a kind of matrix from which a myriad of different ornaments can be derived. He places the octagonal grid preferred in Islamic space at the center of the geometric possibilities. Despite this reference to Islamic tradition, the ornaments developed by Weil are connected with the abstract formal language of modernism and the principle of montage, since he is not interested in the seamless continuation of traditions, but in their modern transformation.

As designs, ornaments are located in a mathematical-geometric space; in order to realize them, they have to be “lifted out” of it and implemented in a more material manner, whether as cloth, carpet or tile, whether on textiles, in books or as part of architecture. A special case of material realization is Weil’s transfer of the ornament to a picture carrier, such as a canvas stretched on a stretcher frame. As soon as the ornament is identified as a picture, it is no longer just an application, a decoration that decorates the canvas, but the ornament becomes the subject of the picture. In doing so, it behaves formally as a picture rectangle and becomes a composition within the boundaries of the picture support. Radical grids that undermine any form of pictorial hierarchy, such as those used in Minimalism, push back the compositional element. In Thomas Weil’s more recent pictures, however, the compositional aspect plays a decisive role, despite the “allover” of the ornamental structures in the picture.

The paintings created in recent years follow on from a series of floral ornaments, which has now been completed, and which in turn has been followed by a series of geometric forms. The more recent paintings are based on ornamental grid constructions, which Weil makes visible, for example, as sinusoidal wave-like patterns. Particularly striking is the use of two basic elements, the point/circle and the line/rectangular surface. Weil distributes them over the non-visible ornamental grids, which at best can only be thought of, in the constructive background, thus placing them in a regular, but by no means simple order that can be seen through immediately. Taking into account the boundaries of the picture and the composition of the picture, he playfully distributes points of different size and colour, for example, freely and yet “captivated” by the ornamental grid across the picture surface. Strokes, dots and lines with dots seem as if, comparable to a magnetic field, their alignment is effected by forces beyond the visible. The individual elements, dots and lines, can be related to each other and to each other. The ordering force is the ornament.

In addition to the ornamental, graphic order, a further factor is the use of different colours, which contribute significantly to the interaction of the picture elements, but also play a decisive role in the relationship between ornament and picture composition. If, for example, a picture consists of dots of different sizes, the different shades of colour contribute significantly to balancing the relationship between large and small, which can often also be seen as a relationship between near and far. Especially the pure point images suggest the comparison with the sight of the starry sky. At first glance, no order can be discerned there; it is only when looking at it that the star chaos forms into constellations.

Even if it is not immediately apparent on fleeting glances, the order that determines Weil’s pictures is the ornament. Ornaments can potentially be continued indefinitely in all directions. The edges of the individual image set a limit to the hypothetical infinity. Thomas Weil repeatedly uses the limitedness of the picture rectangle as a compositional factor. Ideally, he thus pursues a synthesis between the traditional Western image with its borders and hierarchies and the Eastern ornament with its infinite repetitions.

1 Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, in: Adolf Loos, Nevertheless. Collected writings 1900-1930, Vienna 1997, p.79
2 Ebenda 78
3 Ebenda 88
4 Ebenda 87
5 Ebenda 80
6 “The objects realize on two levels the phenomenon of superimposition of writing (or pattern overlapping) as it occurs especially in Islamic architectural ceramics. – Cat. World Cultures and Modern Art, Munich 1972, p. 132
7 Claudia and Thomas Weil, Ornament in Architecture, Art and Design, Munich, 2004