In his book The Remembered Film , Victor Burgin recollects how every afternoon André Breton and Jacques Vaché went to the cinema and indiscriminately and obsessively consumed films; he tells of how Raoul Ruiz would for a while only go and see movies depicting the ancient world in the hope of detecting a plane in the sky, and he quotes Roland Barthes whose interest in the atmosphere inside the cinema was greater than in the films themselves. The assumption that films have a fixed location and time with a beginning and an end has constantly been dismissed by true film enthusiasts for all manner of reasons. With the arrival of video technology all notion of the film as a closed entity intended for public presentation has been utterly dispelled. Before video and then DVD recorders became standard features of every home no one outside the film industry possessed the means of freezing a single frame, of watching a film at high speed, of interrupting a film whenever one felt like it or repeating a particular scene over and over again. Nowadays anyone can. This form of reception naturally insulates the viewer from a film's suggestive narration, heightening his interest in how the plot is constructed and in aspects of seemingly minor importance. Besides this, our current everyday culture is swamped with film references; films can be seen on billboards, in advertising, in press reviews, are talked about in conversation; one quickly feels familiar with a film without ever having seen it. Today we are living - to use Burgin's adaptation of a concept coined by Foucault - in a cinematic heterotopia.

In the way he works with numerous cinematic references Markus Willeke's pictures would be inconceivable were it not for this phenomenon of cinema's omnipresence. Willeke watches a large number of films. He sees them when he finds time to do so, and he sees them many times in a row. Sometimes, only after all these repeated viewings, he will suddenly be struck by a detail he hadn't previously noticed. Watching films in this way changes the consumption of a product of the culture industry into an aesthetic and open-ended project.

The first aspect brought to the fore by this obsessional form of viewing film are the props and the setting. Markus Willeke is particularly taken by the horror genre - films that describe the threat to social cohesion and psychological integrity posed by external danger. There is perhaps also something particularly absurd about watching this genre of film over and over again until the horror has been overstated - and then nullified.

In scenes involving crime and violence, a crucial function in the structuring of the plot is assumed by doors, fences, demarcation tape, warning and emergency signs; they distinguish zones of danger from zones of safety, tell 'here' apart from 'there', the outside from the inside. Willeke isolates and processes his motifs in a complex procedure of transfer and selection. First of all, he photographs film stills from the screen, then paints small- or medium-format watercolours of chosen details. These motifs are then tested in a certain way for their compositional value so they retain their specific expressiveness once blown up onto monumental canvas formats. Strictly speaking, however, the results are not monumental: they are in fact reverted back to the real dimensions of the props or to their slightly exaggerated original proportions. The painted doors are a little larger than real-life doors, the painted fence just marginally higher than such barriers would be in the real world, the police demarcation tape somewhat wider than normal tape. Their colours are heightened, the doorknob, the knotholes in the wooden fence and similar details are rendered in almost caricatural simplicity. Although watercolour is commonly associated with subtlety and with small, delicate formats, often mesmerizing the viewer's gaze with gradual shifts of tonality, here the technique of its application is graphically bold and simple. One could easily claim that watercolour is hardly an appropriate or pertinent medium in such tough and cacophonous times as today. Yet Markus Willeke has found a way of investing watercolour painting with a new task, up-to-date relevance and astounding power. His painting process is astounding too. First he floods the horizontal surface with very diluted paint using variously broad brushes, painting into the still wet paint, and deliberately working with the characteristic watercolour effect of letting one colour bleed or seep into the next. Since this needs to be done at speed, the picture's composition has to be worked out in advance; drips and splashes cannot be avoided and are part of the overall dramatically illusionist effect.

Interestingly, Willeke explains his very personal tradition by speaking of Morris Louis, a post-war American abstract modernist who used highly diluted acrylic to saturate the canvas with sparse, calm lines and thereby achieve a 'graphic' form of abstraction.

It of course depends on the extent of each viewer's knowledge whether the cinematic allusions in Willeke's pictures can be spotted. He only rarely makes a direct reference in the title, nothing more than a cue. But the reference is of no real importance. The motifs have taken on a life of their own and are now subordinate to the painting. In the aforementioned examples of doors, fences, hazard tape, warning and emergency signs, the painted surface has the same proportions and size as the form of the depicted motif, a classical case of trompe l'oeil. The subject has been extracted from the immaterial world of the cinematic image; as a depiction its own flatness is twinned with the flatness of the medium. The way the paintings are hung only reinforces the sense of trompe l'oeil, taking account of the effects of the installation and the scenario staged within the real space occupied by the viewer: the door and fence paintings almost reach down to the floor, those showing demarcation tape criss-cross over each other.

By choosing first to acknowledge cinema's omnipresence as a reservoir of prototypical imagery Willeke's own painted images achieve a new intensity of expression and a new 'illusionistic' autonomy.

Eva Schmidt, Siegen 2006

Translated from the German by Matthew Partridge