It is not easy to find a way to approach to this painting.  If, at one time, 
it appears dull and self-contained, it surprises you another time by its 
luminosity and almost supernatural presence.  Between these two poles, new 
sensory impressions continue to materialize.  The painting, # 97.24, is, like 
its title, concrete and yet open to every interpretation.  Its essence is to 
be found in exactly this amazing adaptability.

Viewed up close, the seemingly uniform application of paint turns out to be 
porous.  The uppermost coat shows a transparent lineament of horizontal brush 
strokes that, despite their homogeneity, allow what lies beneath to shine 
through.  De Crignis works in glazed layers that are alternately vertical and 
horizontal.  The painterly manipulation, the technique used to apply the 
brush strokes, makes the paint sensitive to light.  A finely worked texture 
emerges that allows the light to penetrate the pigment so that it can be 
reflected by the white ground.  In this way the color is also suffused with 
light from behind - from the support itself.

Since the way the canvas ground is constituted is vital to how the light is 
refracted, the undercoat is given as much attention as the upper layers.  The 
extraordinarily porcelain-like density and smoothness of the ground is 
exposed at the edges, which have been primed in their own right.  Several 
applications are required, each of which is sanded down.  The ground is a 
vital element in painting.

The narrow profile of the edges does not so much promote the thing-like 
character of the painting as link the color substance to the wall and to the 
immediate surroundings. Our attention is caught by the traces of swabbed 
paint found on the profile, which infers the yellow within, even before it is 
perceived as such in the painting; or this impression is, at least, 
confirmed.  It is the edges that lead into the painting.

The square-shaped #97.24 is made up of three colors: ultramarine blue and zinc
 white in many, alternately successive layers, as well as a single layer of 
Scheveningen lemon yellow introduced into one of the upper strata. Only at 
the edges can the yellow be seen in a more or less direct, unmixed state. On 
the picture plane itself, it has the effect of a latent veil that, relevant 
to the angle of light, is linked to the body of color and permits its 
visualization as an engrafted color plane.

The lemon yellow signals a fundamental shift in the color-climate to the 
cooler regions.  The decisive factor here is, once again, the effect of the 
light.  The yellow acts as a complement to the blue, as a source of friction 
that leads to greater color saturation -- and intensifies the character of 
the hue.

The white intermediate layers, like an echo, repeat the white of the primed 
canvas.  As a result, the first color coat, as well as each successive one, 
is given a kind of overall white enhancement.  The light that falls on the 
painting, as well as the light in the painting, reacts to this in 
differentiated refractions, whereby the yellow represents a caesura in the 
regular rhythm of the white and blue foils.  The illuminating yellow enriches 
the already strikingly fine modulations that animate the color from within by 
one more light-sensitive factor.

This explains the high adaptability of the painting. The paint is capable of 
literally soaking up light.  The stronger the light, the more the color 
achieves atmospheric depth.  Whereas by declining light, the substantial 
density of the color becomes foregrounded.

The purity of the ultramarine blue is broken by the yellow as well as by the 
white.  The more the blue fades under waning light, the stronger the yellow 
and white function as dampeners.  The color turns pale. The sparingly and 
thinly applied paint layers merge in the end -- shortly before they disappear 
in total darkness -- to a highly condensed substance that seems less to float 
in front of the wall than to grow from a non-plumbable depth.

The ambivalence of #97.24 is generated by its enormous range of color/light 
sensations.  The painting is under constant tension.  Its highly sensitive 
color plane fluctuates between being an opening onto a color space as a 
mystical experience where the viewer loses himself, on the one hand, and a 
consolidation into a strong color presence before which the viewer feels 
himself physically confronted, on the other.
It is, in the end, left to the viewer's mood and insight to determine how the 
events in the painting are perceived.  A devotional viewer will regard the 
same picture at the same moment in a different way from a viewer who 
self-confidently stands up to it.

It seems characteristic to me that the painting tries so hard to elude the 
categories associated with the color blue (and especially with ultramarine 
blue).  This keeps it accessible to the inspiration and the dynamism of the 
penetrating gaze.  The gaze brings the painting into line with its own 
personal experience.

In that one bright moment when # 97.24 was brought to glow so that it began to
 dance and left an indelible impression on my optic nerve, the painting 
became my painting.  It never left me the whole day.  Wherever I was, I had 
this blue before my eyes that seemed to hover over things like a vision of a 
protracted space, something of whose depth and inscrutability I found 
reflected in it.

Sabine Müller

(Translated from the German by Jeanne Haunschild, Bonn)