Walking attentive and amazed throughout life

A couple of months ago, when Tom Sommerlatte asked me whether I might be willing to talk about his pictures, I agreed without a moment’s hesitation.

I have known Tom Sommerlatte for many years. To be precise, I first came across him soon after I arrived in the Rhine-Main area at the end of the 1990s, and initially our acquaintance was rather one-sided and confined to the context of the Friends of the Museum Wiesbaden, where I did various odd jobs as a student. Among my duties was sending out exhibition information and the annual programme. At the time, it was a manageable task of some 300 envelopes. Today, with more than 1500 members, I would no longer be able to do it on my own.

Thus, our paths initially crossed indirectly, through the address on the envelope, so to speak. A little later, we also met at the museum itself, i.e. within the context and framework of art. What I didn’t know at the time – and admittedly didn’t know for a long time – was that Tom was an artist himself and had been working as an artist for most of his life. It was not until later, when we were both on the board of the Ritschl Society, that I got to know him not only as a profound connoisseur of art but also as a painter. For him, he said, the encounter with Otto Ritschl during the final years of the older artist’s life had been both an affirmation and an incentive to go his own way and to devote himself to working in colour.

At the age of twenty, Sommerlatte begun to study chemistry in Berlin. He had a facility with drawing but agreed to his parents’ wishes and went for something more ‘sensible’ first. He kept drawing ‘on the side’ – to indulge his passion, but perhaps also to compensate for the dryness of his scientific studies.

Right from the start, his compositions were informed by a sense of being carefully constructed; his images evolved from the motifs, and the motifs themselves were developed into grids or patterns. His drawings were clearly structured, ordered. The people they captured in sketch-like fashion did not really communicate, they were very cool, if that word was already current in the budding West Berlin jazz scene of the time.

Sommerlatte found his motifs in dance halls and clubs – chief among them the Eierschale, one of the buzziest jazz venues in Berlin in the late 1950s – and turned his impressions into existentialist collages and striking compositions.

Sharp lines established a sense of order in his pictures, traversed and defined the pictorial space and the picture plane, where soft forms were to dominate later. Built architecture with corners and edges formed tightly interlocked compositions that were marked by a dynamic tension across the picture plane.

But it was not until more than ten years later – by which time Tom Sommerlatte had made his home in the Taunus – that these early works gave rise to the organic forms that continue to shape his work today: corporeal, often erotic and – at least in terms of colour – lighter and somehow more poetic. Painting as an alternative to an oppressed, burdened world.
I have to say, though, that Tom Sommerlatte himself has always struck me as an optimist and as someone who is usually of good cheer. His manner is as infectious as it is soothing, and he has the wonderful ability to resolve problems and conflicts in the gentlest of ways. And this is exactly what we find in his paintings as well. Sommerlatte focuses on the basics, often chromatic harmonies or formal motifs, repeating them across the composition to show them in a different light.

His work is poised between figuration and abstraction. The early graphic series you can see in the exhibition already show figurative elements as well as half-abstract forms derived from them.

Spatially intertwined forms occupy the picture plane; rounded shapes form fantastic worlds, which Tom Sommerlatte describes as a ‘continent between Belgium and Luxembourg,’ i.e. as figments of the imagination, dream worlds or escapes.

And his paintings do indeed provide scope for our own thoughts, our own feelings to find inspiration in their sensitive palette. Sommerlatte’s colours tend to belong to a spectrum, which is to say they are tonal – cool or warm – and establish an overall mood. This is complemented by the intertwined forms that infuse the composition with a sense of order and, usually, harmony. The forms are rooted in figuration; not one of Sommerlatte’s paintings is purely abstract. Instead they recognisably draw on landscape, urban architecture or organic plant forms. When the human figure does make an appearance, it now is integrated in the overall composition, embedded in the ground rather than isolated as it was in the early existentialist pen and ink drawings.