DAVE BOPP

Deeply fascinated by phenomena that elude human comprehension, I am drawn to experiences that elicit a sense of total overwhelm. Whether contemplating the cosmic environment that envelops and permeates us or introspecting on one's inner universe, where the struggle to fathom even a fraction of the wonder of our sentient self unfolds, these moments of mental inundation leave me feeling powerless yet intensely excited, as they mark the limits of language and give rise to an expanding mental vacuum. Yet always within this vacuum, an undertow emerges, seeking equilibrium through the channels of one's own imagination and fantasy.

The inner images arising through this maelstrom are the source and the impetus for my decision to pursue artistry and the underlying force propelling my everyday studio practice. Transforming these images into artistic works demands a genuine openness to failure because precisely in failure, unexpected revelations often unfold, unveiling new perspectives as I allow myself to be guided by its diversion.

Painting is my chosen tool, a gateway enabling me to draw from this infinite pool of possibilities. Through materializing these extractions with a variety of different paints and techniques, I strive to expand the horizons of both reality and imagination. The exploration of previously unimaginable spaces and places becomes an exhilarating journey, with the act of painting serving as the vessel that carries me to these uncharted territories.

The marvel of my surroundings, the vast expanse of space and time, and the acknowledgement of human limitations in perception are deeply inspiring. This heightened awareness of the immense and vibrant, often hidden worlds pushes me to craft my own images – my own idols – celebrating the enigmatic nature of these concealed realms.

Dave Bopp is fascinated by phenomena that are beyond human understanding and often show up as feelings—like the sense of being totally overwhelmed. His paintings come close to this peculiar emotional state. In making his work, he draws from the imagery of science fiction and popular science publications, particularly texts from the field of astronomy. In addition, he is inspired by visual simulations that demonstrate events occurring within microscopic and macroscopic worlds. He also takes inspiration from his own experience of what he describes as the “mental vacuum”:

“In these moments, there is a visual and mental overload. It makes you feel weak, almost to the point of surrender. This state marks the end of language and creates a mental vacuum. It forms a vortex that can only be countered with the help of your own imagination and fantasy.”¹

For Bopp, the “mental images” (“Kopfbilder”) developed in this vacuum serve as essential compositional cues. However, it is difficult to create an actual one-to-one translation of the internal images that emerge in an emotional short-circuit. Numerous artists have described the gap that occurs when such images enter reality. The centuries-old artistic consideration of the sublime also illustrates the attempt to capture these particular moments of human existence through various motifs and representational forms. In his 1948 essay “The Sublime is Now,” Barnett Newman explains Abstract Expressionism’s interest in the visual exploration of the sublime:

“We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. […] We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images, both sublime and beautiful. […] The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”²

In this text, Newman distances himself from the European tradition, claiming that it creates a false link between the feeling of sublimity and the ideal of beauty. Irrespective of his obvious intention to give American abstract art a competitive edge, the large-format nonrepresentational compositions of Abstract Expressionism constitute a turning point in the discourse of the sublime. Here the sublime is experienced directly through the image and not through a representation of the absolute. In addition, the processes involved in the act of reception are key: viewers are confronted with a picture plane that generally extends beyond their field of view, making it difficult to gain a sense of orientation. Each viewer is thrown back onto him or herself.

Dave Bopp’s paintings recall the works of the Abstract Expressionists both in terms of their content and their large-format, “all-over” compositions that stretch from one edge of the image to the other. The ethos of Abstract Expressionism also echoes in his ideas about the picture as an entity and in his rejection of the notion that painting is essentially representational. According to Bopp, his paintings don’t represent the cosmos, the unfathomable vastness of the universe, or the “mental images” described above. Instead, they are visual inventions that borrow from these things in addition to other sources of inspiration, including numerous artist role models.

If some aspects of Abstract Expressionism live on in Bopp’s work, there are also discrepancies. Bopp cultivates a different kind of relationship with the viewer. He describes this as the “opportunity to wander through the picture.”³ His compositions often offer points of orientation that take the form of visual nodes or the ideas invoked by certain constructions of shape and color. Unlike Newman, Bopp allows his audience to wear the “nostalgic glasses of history.” Compared to the artist’s primarily vegetal pieces (created until 2018), his most recent work demonstrates an increasing interest in the process of association. The paintings stimulate the imaginative realm of both the artist and the viewer, triggering an echo.

This points to another key figure of reference for Bopp: the painter Bernard Schultze, a proponent of the German Informel. Through the process of painting, Schultze attempted to release the fantastic parts of his own subjectivity:

“Such images, scraps of memory rushed into me. I allowed myself to be carried away by them in a chain of associations. At the same time, I tried to watch myself over my own shoulder. The exciting game, idea and control in quick succession, had begun. That was the stimulant, and that’s why painting was a substitute for life.”⁴

Bopp and Schultze share numerous elements in their paintings: inextricably tangled thickets; the principle of growth; the interplay between idea, control, and chance; and an automatism that enters into the creative process. Schultze’s description of attempting to look over his own shoulder while painting brings to mind Bopp’s method of photographing each layer of paint and editing and preparing certain shapes on the computer. This pro cedure stems from Bopp’s desire to adopt a position outside of the gestural moment of painting. Schultze’s sculptural relief paintings offer another point of comparison. In these works, Schultze forms paint, textiles, and other materials into ulcerous structures on the canvas. Similarly, Dave Bopp sees the acrylic resin paint he uses as an evocative material. He places one layer on top of another, resulting in fusions, overlays, elevations, indentations, and—in new works like Untitled Sheet #3 (2019) and Untitled Sheet #4 (2019)—prominent veins that run across the surface of the picture. Bopp thinks of painting in terms of depth as opposed to flatness. Each layer he applies is like skin, with (image) veins appearing underneath. This skin is partially opened, removed, or covered over. In his painting process, Bopp adopts an almost surgical gaze that allows him to see the organic qualities of his materials. Here we find echoes of the artist Lynda Benglis:

“I am involved with those icons since they are really involved with feelings or gestures that have to do with a physical presence that one can identify with, in other words. When one looks at them they take on an anthropomorphic gesture and most of my work has that kind of feeling of movement in physicality, in that it suggests the body or brings up bodily responses […].”⁵

There is something inherently organic about Benglis’s abstract sculptures and image-objects. The shapes and materials she uses, particularly rubber and wax, suggest physical analogies between the work and the viewer. Dave Bopp’s paintings, on the other hand, do not invoke the human body. Instead, his approach—and the surgical painting process described above—brings to mind organic structures that are much more basic. As in Benglis’s practice, this association strengthens the physical presence of the artwork and allows the viewer to identify with it.

Another reference to Benglis’s work can be found in the principle of pouring. In the 1960s, Benglis began pouring various shades of liquid latex onto the floor. Similarly, Bopp pours paint onto aluminum composite boards lying on the ground. By allowing the paint to move in its own way, both artists emphasize the essence of their materials and deliberately surrender a certain amount of authorial control. Bopp is extremely interested in how the artist exerts influence during the creative process. His own interventions oscillate between steps that are carried out on the computer and more intuitive stages of image production. He experiments with various ways to edit shapes and colors onscreen, generating templates or basic compositions from these preliminary studies. However, there is always something unpredictable in the process of applying paint and compressing up to 40 layers within a single surface texture. This unpredictability relates both to the autonomy of the materials and the internal state of the artist.

When it comes to layering, Dave Bopp is fascinated by the works of Philip Taaffe. Taaffe’s painting practice highlights a very different approach to layering paint, shifting the focus from the materiality of pigment to the superimposition of painted shapes. Taaffe generally places different ornamental motifs on top of one another. He uses both geometric and figurative ornaments that repeat across the entire surface of the painting, forming an all-over structure. Here a decisive feature of the ornament, namely its distinction between figure and ground, is taken to the point of absurdity. At the same time, however, these individual patterns are universal forms that can be located in the space of ornament across many different cultures. Dave Bopp is interested in how the formal density in Taaffe’s work simultaneously retains legibility. Moreover, Taaffe’s process is the exact opposite of Bopp’s own. While Taaffe begins with a figurative element that is abstracted through rhythmic repetition, the fundamentally abstract forms in Bopp’s work often become concrete despite the fact that an object was never the starting point. These autopoetic or self-generating elements are an essential aspect of Bopp’s painting process. At such moments, the artist deliberately attempts to push his authorial control into the background, approaching the sense of the mental vacuum—for some time, at least, and to varying degrees.

“In my opinion, the exciting and fascinating thing about painting is the invention of images. […] It’s essential for an image to cut the cord with its original concept and transition into a self-determined process. […] I immediately used to paint over anything that was too clearly identifiable in a painting. This happened relatively often. Over time, however, my interest in these associations—and the temptation to pursue them—grew stronger. […] And I noticed how the paintings increasingly began to detach from my ideas and become self-sufficient.”⁶

Over the last seven years, Dave Bopp has developed a unique visual language and a complex working method. His practice probes the possibilities and limits of abstract painting and explores the tension between the physical effects and evocative potential of his compositions. All of this is done with an awareness of the history of painting, as indicated by the numerous sources of inspiration that reverberate in his work. At the same time, Bopp’s paintings exist outside of the art historical frame. In capturing a sense of the sublime, they call up memories of similar singular experiences. They invite an encounter with the self.

RC       As we all know, painting has been declared dead all too often. When was the last time that you painted in a totally traditional sense with a paintbrush on canvas?

DB       I would say it was two or three semesters after I started studying at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. If memory serves me correctly, I last worked with canvas in early 2012. I was doing experiments with materials, often wet-on-wet, where I combined different painting mediums – from synthetic resin and solvents to ink and tusche – and observed how they reacted to each other and what structures could be generated.

RC       Interesting. In 2015, when I saw your work for the first time, it seemed very experimental to me, but in a mature way. It appeared as if the painting actually emerged from itself like a sort of chemical reaction giving rise to colours and forms. Not on canvas, but rather on aluminium composite panels. And I can’t tell whether this involved a paintbrush. Could you reconstruct for me how you arrived at that point?

DB       I realised from early on that canvas was not right for what I was trying to do, and that the paintbrush was not the only tool for it. And back then I could describe what I was trying to do much better than I can now. I had quite a clear idea of what a picture of mine was supposed to look like. So I had to find the right tools and learn how to master them to get as close as possible to what I was picturing. This is how my repertoire of mediums and techniques and tools has been expanded continually. It has always been a priority for me to be able to fully try out whatever occurred to me. And that wasn’t possible anymore with canvas. I needed a strong and durable ground because I noticed that this was what assured me the greatest possible freedom in how I applied paint. On the whole, this can perhaps best be summarised as wide-ranging research about form and colour. When the studio got its own cutting plotter, I suddenly became able to outsource and automate some aspects of the generation of form.

RC       That is to say, different tools now play a role in your artistic process. As I understand it, you paint, you then take photographs of the newly created states with a digital camera, and you upload the images to the computer. There they undergo various digital processes in which you extract forms that then find their way back into the picture via a cutting plotter. It seems to me that in this process, painting takes on a variety of aggregate states. And yet it is and always remains painting.

DB       Exactly – what remains is always just paint on a carrier. Earlier, the images developed out of themselves much more. Each painting process provided the new samples for the next one, as it were, and each additional intermediate state provided the raw material that I processed on the computer. More specifically, in this process the picture information was compressed and, for example, completely downscaled to black and white with a threshold value. This created forms that were nothing more than highly compressed light and dark zones of each photographed intermediate state. I was able to crop these images, process them further, and rearrange them, all however I liked. The cutting plotter then cut them into the adhesive foil directly and in exact proportion. They were then stuck onto the picture, painted over and finally removed.

This method became quite established over a certain period of time. The whole process became sort of self-sustaining and I was ever more in the position of just facilitating it. At some point I got the feeling that the whole thing had become too rigid or had turned into a sort of excuse for me – it was somehow hermetic and untouchable. Eventually there was no more element of surprise and honestly, I became somewhat bored too. I wanted the computer not to be so decisive about the images and to go back to being more of a pure tool. And I wanted to expand the range of imagery.

RC       That is, if I may say so, highly remarkable. In recent years your painting has been received incredibly positively. You have continually expanded your painting and pushed its limits to the point of museum formats – not out of megalomania, but rather in quite a convincing way in my opinion. And now you’re going in a different direction so as not to get bored?

DB       I think the most exciting and fascinating thing about painting is the invention of pictures. Developing something that one could not dream up. It is essential for a picture to cut the cord of a previous notion of the picture and for its creation to segue into a self-determined process. To satisfy this, I paradoxically had to start drawing the forms myself again, for which I used a tablet. This then had a very noticeable effect on my formal and visual language: the forms became appreciably larger and more explicit. Earlier, whenever I felt like I recognised something too clearly in the picture, I would immediately paint over it. That happened relatively often. Over time, my interest in these associations – and the temptation to pursue them – grew ever greater. You might imagine that I had gained more control over the development of the pictures this way, but in fact the opposite was the case. The result became more open and less predictable. I noticed how much the pictures increasingly decoupled themselves from my expectations and became more autonomous.

RC       The champions of abstraction – perhaps most radically, the abstract expressionists and the painters of art informel – had precisely this in mind: to counter the visual world with something that completely eluded the familiar, the identifiable and the associative. I see your early works as standing in this tradition: painting as pure painting or as gesture; an all-over structure with no hierarchy of motif and ground; an artistic process that erases everything seemingly recognisable. In comparison, the works that have been created since 2018 seem almost compressed, however unforeseeable the outcome and the resultant associations may be for you. You previously spoke of the “greatest possible freedom” – is this freedom, which you described as a sort of painterly field of experimentation, limited by this or does it open up for you entirely new possibilities of inventing pictures?

DB       It feels as if the freedom is quite endless, which does not actually make things easier – entirely the opposite, in fact. Currently I do not really have a formula for developing pictures. One idea just constantly follows the next, and I need to improvise anew after each new state of the picture. This demands some endurance. I currently work well and happily on each picture for multiple months, completely regardless of the size of the format. At the same time, the pictures develop very quickly in the process and are sometimes completely unrecognisable after two or three days. This is like a slot machine, it’s as if I’m constantly pulling the lever and waiting for a row of three matching symbols to come up. And that could just as easily happen on the third try as the hundredth try. Each day in the studio represents experience gained, however, and is recorded with ever greater precision. For example, I make and archive a photo of each intermediate step, and sometimes I attach notes or technical data about things like the application of paint. I think such phases are totally important for one’s own artistic development.

RC       What does it means for you to pull a matching row of three at the slot machine? Or to put it a different way, when has your process reached a state where you think the result is good and you hand it over, as it were, to the public?

DB       There can be this immediate moment when it clicks. But there are also works that sit around in the studio for six months or a year without being worked on before I realise that they’re actually finished. These are results that I sometimes need to let mature for a while. In any event, it’s a completely subjective decision and not necessarily comprehensible to an outside observer. Probably it’s even just an assertion that I need to take responsibility for as the originator. And I’m not able to do that until a work satisfies a need that’s important to me. A need that I also have when I’m looking at other art. Unfortunately, I can only put it very vaguely. In any event it’s manifested primarily as emotion. If I try to remember these moments, they’re mostly charged with a sort of euphoria – and sometimes confusion as well – or both at the same time. What they share in common is, above all, the recollection of a contemplative moment of observation and of a state where everything seems somehow self-evident and immutable.

RC       You’ve mentioned your growing interest in associations – to what extent do the titles of your works contribute to opening up or deliberately closing off associations? Your early works had names like BOABANO or YPYOA; the recent titles are somewhat more concrete or at least more vivid: SUNDOWN, BOULDER or AFTERGLOW. And what in the world is the exhibition title WALLHACK about?

DB       Finding titles for pictures has always been difficult for me because I don’t want to inject any additional meaning or symbolism into the pictures. To preserve their sovereignty, I initially used a random generator and took the letter combinations it generated as picture names. I no longer take such a strict view of the matter and, as you said, I’m starting to choose more vivid titles that name something that intrudes on my own perspective. I find that they function as a sort of access code for the observer – as an additional trigger that activates the process of looking, interpreting and projecting. That’s also exactly how I try to choose my exhibition titles. In our example, WALLHACK is a term from the gamer scene. It means a cheat that enables the player to see through virtual walls and possibly walk through them too. So this term is sort of captured and its original setting is replaced by the exhibition context. In the exhibition, we don’t use any partition walls. Instead we almost exclusively show large-format works that function as partitions and displays.

“floating icebergs with a taste of antimatter crazy physics”: this is how Lebanese poet, painter, and thinker Etel Adnan describes the earthly status quo in her cycle of poems A Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut (1968), dedicated to the first man ever in outer space, the Soviet military pilot Yuri Gagarin, one year after his death in 1968. Seven years before, Gagarin had orbited the planet in 108 minutes and thus caused not just a political sensation but also achieved a pioneering expansion of our horizon. The limitless possibilities offered by outer space seemed finally within our grasp. But the view of the world also changed now that our blue planet could be captured from an entirely new perspective. “I saw the earth looked like a children’s ball,” Gagarin later reported. The cosmonaut’s journey brought about a comprehensive expansion of our perception and thus opened new spheres beyond the familiar and the previously conceivable. This is precisely where the works of Swiss artist David Bopp take us as well.

Dave Bopp’s profound interest in what takes place beyond our spectrum of perception is revealed at first in form and color. The striking painting techniques and the brilliance of the surfaces of color that allude to something that seems to take place beyond our visible world are quite characteristic of this. Bopp’s largeformat works on aluminum composite panels, for example Astral Beast N°3 (2020) und Debris (2020) illustrate how the individual structures come together and take up the entire support. From close up, in contrast, the forms literally stand out from one another, revealing the artist’s approach. What is perceived from afar as a smooth surface proves to be an almost relief-like topography of paint on closer inspection. Using stencils, the artist works on the support so that the various surfaces and layers of color remain clearly recognizable. These superimpositions ensure a virtually tactile experience that can only be understood with a carefully tracing gaze.

While the individual shapes allow for the artist’s targeted influence and control, the approach to the lacquer paints is more open, since Bopp consciously allows the dynamics and potentials that inhere in the material to work for themselves. The process thus seems to sway between intentional loss of control and active intervention. Using a kind of sampling process, Bopp uses the computer to search through photographically documented intermediate states of his works looking for formal details and sections that form the starting point for the next stencil. Many forms thus develop on their own, but they each operate independently in these newly ascribed contexts. They refer to an “outside,” both in the sense of their origin in Bopp’s visual cosmos as well as an “outside” beyond the supposedly prescribed frame that seeks to create freely using the beholder’s own associations.

A fundamental aspect of Bopp’s artistic practice inheres not least in these open references that oscillate between the visible and the invisible. Although many works emerge from a concrete visual concept and an idea in the mind of the artist, they depart from this more and more in the process of working, through the overpainting and layering, taking on lives of their own and finally allowing space for new associations. Especially when hung next to one another, the three works Plutonic Dream (2020), Boulder (2019), and Mock Suns (2020) show the spectrum of formal approaches and their varied impact. Furthermore, individual elements and structures within the images as well as the partially instructive titles of the works themselves reveal a certain direction of thought, but far from claiming to formulate it entirely or to conclude it. The artist refers to the title as a kind of “trigger that activates the process of viewing, interpreting, and projecting.” But in the very moment when the work Boulder reveals its rock fragments, it seems as if they would once again refuse our gaze. The amorphous shapes transform, they begin to move and thus unsettle the labile order of references revealing the inexhaustible possibilities of subjective perception and fantasy.

The artist thus understands himself as a kind of moderating authority of his painterly field of experimentation that also includes smaller works on paper where the surfaces are marbled or treated with remains of paint. Here as well, a technical and a thematic act of balancing is revealed, a complex play between recognition and withdrawal. This flickering shows the possibilities of an image: a “phenotype” which draws from an almost limitless pool of possibilities. This is why the works have an open, or rather, a repeatedly opening structure that is oriented towards the world and its characteristics, but operates beyond displays of visibility and reason. Dave Bopp’s painting is hence founded in a constantly expanding visual sphere that overcomes our imagination and remains ungraspable. It is thus hardly an accident that a further passage Adnan’s Funeral March describes a situation that captures the process of perception in Bopp’s own universe all too accurately:

“an incoherent light wave was moving behind the clouds
and you went swimming into that distant pool
you went to be suspended there”

The first pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope are truly astounding. These stellar images reveal the depths of the universe that were blurred in comparison with the now outdated technology we relied on before. Not only are we now able to bear witness to the birth of stars, but also the birth of entire galaxies, 13 billion light years away. This is however, only a sliver of what surrounds us, a grain of sand on an endless sandy beach.

This is just to say, what we know is crushed under the weight of what we don’t know and perhaps will never know. Why do I speak of this? To introduce you to the works of Dave Bopp. 

Dave Bopp is a Berlin-based artist whose paintings resemble an oscillating cosmos. Working in layers, Bopp builds his compositions to trigger self-reinforcing tendencies. What he creates he either embraces or abandons; some aspects of the painting are carved to reveal its history while others serve to host thinly sliced geodes which contain entire universes in themselves. 

Abstraction has always been a fickle subject. It is the representation of something that is without representation. The abstraction that Bopp represents is part catalyst who incites the chemistry of movement and part moderator whose hand guides the piece to become part of the conversation. This process is important as his works overwrite each other constantly, intermediate stages are being processed further, thus allowing the sovereignty of his works to stem from their own creation

Bopp’s paintings are of the macro and the micro, they represent entire undiscovered universes outside and inside of us. This ambivalence is what drives the work: what’s within helps to discover the outer, space or self is up to the viewer. As we aspire to push our boundaries higher and higher, we can excite in the discoveries in his explorations.