My artistic work is driven by the search for
resonance as a form of existence. It is initially an unintentional, playful and
athematic drawing from the void, in which traces of the familiar emerge from
the body's memory. Thus my pictorial worlds often sound out this borderline
space in which familiar things like landscapes and scenes emerge from the
abstract or the empty surface.
In their formal incompleteness, the newly
constituted contexts elude attempts to interpret them, despite strong moments
of recognition. Located in the field of tension between the white nothingness,
the abstract and the concrete, the elusive transitions and the abrupt change,
the slow and sudden disappearance and emergence, the spatial depth and the
disruption by the depthless white, the brittleness and vulnerability of
something seemingly firmly established or given, like a landscape, is lifted
into the picture. By giving equal space to the open, the imagined, the
disconcertingly incomprehensible and the familiar conscious, they hem each
other in in their claims to make valid statements about the world. At the same
time, they refuse any totalising tendency.
Landscape pictures are conscious or unconscious
confrontations with the question of possible cognitive, spiritual and emotional
roots of man in the material spatial conditions. Thus, they can also be
examined for their expressiveness with regard to socio-political questions.
Landscapes are multi-layered cultural memories.
Here, economic, cultural and ecological realities meet built, staged and felt
longings in equal measure. They are the venue for insufficiently understood
complexities and latent crises, as climate data or a close look at the
processes of soil degradation teach us, as do the effects of tourism, which
directly and indirectly destroys the very landscapes of longing on which it
lives - to pick out a few examples. The ecological crisis is a crisis of
concern in a globalised fluid world with a loosened spatial reference, where
responsibilities get lost in the ramifications of unmanageable chains of
connections. Landscapes as places of emotional retreat from individual
excessive demands are once again prominently in play here, as tourism and
advertising subjects impressively demonstrate in equal measure. The
strengthening of place-based responsibility as a response to the experience of
globalisation, however, holds both great opportunities and fascist dangers.
Earth attachment needs to be rethought as a response to the multiple crises.
Landscape quickly comes back into play here via the concept of home. The
perception of vulnerability and fragility, of the ambiguity and provisionality
of assessments could open the way to prioritising a regime of concern over one
of power.
