The Sky, Bejewelled Text by Wilfried Wiegand Photographers, they

The Sky, Bejewelled
Text by Wilfried Wiegand
Photographers, they say, are hunters: They pursue their motifs, catch them and shoot
them. The tourist “bags”, as it were, the already long-known sights with his camera; the
reporter is hot on the trail of those that lie concealed. In the case of Gabrielle Strijewski’s
Palermo photographs, however, these similes are of no help. Her images are not hunted,
they are found.
Nothing looks sought-after, intentional, or contrived, although the choice of colours and
the play of lines are of refined beauty. These works emit an aura of serenity. We are
acquainted with beauty as something exceptional. Here, however, we are introduced to it
as a delightful matter of course. Only he who is familiar with non-representational art,
however, will even notice this beauty. Only he who knows from experience how entire
worlds can be conceived on a paper rectangle will perceive that the camera obediently
follows his eyes and composes pictures for him rather than mere details. Many who have
strolled through the markets in Palermo will have noticed the colourfulness and variation
with which the sun roofs are stretched out over the stands. But who has the chutzpah to
look at this patchwork panorama as though it were a picture gallery, full of hundreds of
hidden works? Gabrielle Strijewski looks beauty in the face, as though it had been doing
nothing but waiting for her. She can trust her explorer’s eyes and leave the work of
pictorial composition to the coincidental beauty of Palermo. She doesn’t have to
intervene, she only has to choose from an overabundance.
What do we see? The canopies over market stands, assembled in constantly changing
patchworks. The pieces of cloth that happen to be at hand are the material. Colourful
lengths of sail protect the wheelings and dealings of the people from the light of the sky.
Artificial darknesses are created by the shade of the cut, gathered, laced, stretched,
sewn and puffed-up textiles. Light bulbs light the artificial darknesses with artificial light.
Once in a while, a piece of heaven is also permitted to participate in the devil-may-care
competition of colours and patterns, but the narrow fragments of sky can hardly make
themselves heard in the concert of motley tones.
Compositions of alluring richness take shape. Many of the cloth fragments have reckless
contours, others exhibit the regularity of the banal, some are naively colourful, others
display subdued, toned-down hues, still others are so sombre that they turn into
mysterious black holes. The combinatorics at work here seems inexhaustible and
nevertheless obeys the stringent demands of practical life. Everything has to be simple,
cheap and utilitarian – and please the eye at the same time. Markets aren’t just there for
shopping, markets are also festivities where people go to look, be amazed, celebrate life.
Even the most modest market, no matter what country it is in, reflects this quality,
however dimly. But here in Palermo, everything becomes a celebration. Even the
coincidence that brings the colourful patches together beneath the sky indulges in a
beauty-drunken orgy.
The camera looks upward. It registers colours and patterns and, rather unintentionally
and incidentally, the odd allusion to the spatial situation. But the poles, ropes and
horizons hardly serve as an orientation aid. The peep-show perspective with which we
normally perceive the world has lost its validity. What we know there as up and down,
front and back, we can safely forget here. The motifs are calm, nothing is moving, in a
few minutes nothing will look entirely different from the way it looks now; at the most we
can imagine a gentle breeze passing through these stretched-out, propped-up pieces of
cloth, almost imperceptibly keeping them in motion, as though they were cautiously
breathing. We gaze into the sun shades as though we were lying on board a boot and
contemplating the rigging high above us. What we see is not the geometry of pasty-white
sailcloth, however, but Palermo’s raucous chromatic splendour. It isn’t being pointed out
to us how beautiful Palermo is. Here beauty is entirely self-evident, it is part of everyday
life, it is squandered.
The images tell no stories. But they do show enough of the specific situation to remind us
of real marketplaces; sometimes a detail suffices, for example the light bulbs, unexpected
in the southern sunlight. They conjure up a world between reality and abstraction which
can be wonderfully explored in the large-scale prints. The marketeers of Palermo have
bejewelled the sky, covered it with colourful cloths until its threatening void has
disappeared. The fine meshes of the tent roof keep the vacuity of the cosmos in check. It
is the oriental sense of beauty which does not fear emptiness but embellishes it until it
becomes abundance. And in Sicily the Orient is so close.

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