Closer Up
The title of this series is aimed at the question of perceptual proximity and distance and consequently questions the relationship of a visual object to the viewer. A blurring sensation consistent with adjusting a lens is also a question of perceptual attitude that moves an object in or out of focus.
A roaming view leaves vague traces of a brief encounter in memory. closer up demands more intense looking, moving in – moving out – meditating on sensuous colors and rational image analysis.
Color fields are equal entities in closer up, which do not confrontationally contrast with one another as hard-edge elements that have to assert themselves as equal quantities, but are balanced as unequal individual components. Complementary colors enter into a cooperative dialogue. We experience brightness as an imaginary pushing back of color appearances on the visual stage.
As if breaking through rigid rules of constructive concepts, we experience the all-round cropping of the color fields, as if parts of the image were withdrawn from us. This detail quality relativizes the two central color fields in their formal self-evidence, and by the same token the self-evidence of the entire image. We have to imagine an ‘in front of it’, ‘next to it’ and ‘behind it’;
the image as a focus of the here and now, simultaneous, but the entire connection expansive. A feeling of the heaviness of time becomes perceptible in these paintings.
The soft transitions and fusion zones, which result from an intensive painterly approach of adjacent color fields, metaphorically create a consciousness for other realities of life: Border zones of contrasting languages, but also dialectal colorings or approaches of different individuals in a long-term relationship.
The deepening of these soft assimilation zones wakes ideas of tolerance and placidity in me, acceptance of the other, instead of exclusion or refraint.
If the hard-edge rows of colors of Concrete Art from the 1960s and 1970s with their smooth, pure-colored surfaces without traces of the brush – as a search for non-hierarchical, egalitarian compositions of images – embody an expression aimed at anonymity and objectivity, the color field compositions of closer up are consciously emotional compressions of a moment in time:
an unhurried, consciously slowed down painting process on the fringe of an all-dominating media frenzy, and consequently, painterly-reflexive island worlds of visual sensibility.
They are provocative havens of tranquility.
A form of objective blurriness, in which the moment in time can penetrate and express itself, occurs in the transitional and fusion zones.
There are two parallel endeavors in Bettina Rave’s paintings, which continue to manifest themselves in her most recent works, “on the one hand, the ever more insistent force of the space to want to perceive the entire space as ‘image’ and on the other hand an impulse to move in more closely, to want to stop time, to pay homage to the sublime in a contemporary manner,” as she so sensitively describes them.
Closer up embodies a counterpoint to her large-scale pixel spaces and their aleatory possibilities of dealing with space individually, but moving closer up, with all the detailedness intimated to us, equally strives for a space-consuming evolve-ment.
In these works, we experience painting as a plastic expression of emotional closeness.
Closer Up
The title of this series is aimed at the question of perceptual proximity and distance and consequently questions the relationship of a visual object to the viewer. A blurring sensation consistent with adjusting a lens is also a question of perceptual attitude that moves an object in or out of focus.
A roaming view leaves vague traces of a brief encounter in memory. closer up demands more intense looking, moving in – moving out – meditating on sensuous colors and rational image analysis.
Color fields are equal entities in closer up, which do not confrontationally contrast with one another as hard-edge elements that have to assert themselves as equal quantities, but are balanced as unequal individual components. Complementary colors enter into a cooperative dialogue. We experience brightness as an imaginary pushing back of color appearances on the visual stage.
As if breaking through rigid rules of constructive concepts, we experience the all-round cropping of the color fields, as if parts of the image were withdrawn from us. This detail quality relativizes the two central color fields in their formal self-evidence, and by the same token the self-evidence of the entire image. We have to imagine an ‘in front of it’, ‘next to it’ and ‘behind it’;
the image as a focus of the here and now, simultaneous, but the entire connection expansive. A feeling of the heaviness of time becomes perceptible in these paintings.
The soft transitions and fusion zones, which result from an intensive painterly approach of adjacent color fields, metaphorically create a consciousness for other realities of life: Border zones of contrasting languages, but also dialectal colorings or approaches of different individuals in a long-term relationship.
The deepening of these soft assimilation zones wakes ideas of tolerance and placidity in me, acceptance of the other, instead of exclusion or refraint.
If the hard-edge rows of colors of Concrete Art from the 1960s and 1970s with their smooth, pure-colored surfaces without traces of the brush – as a search for non-hierarchical, egalitarian compositions of images – embody an expression aimed at anonymity and objectivity, the color field compositions of closer up are consciously emotional compressions of a moment in time:
an unhurried, consciously slowed down painting process on the fringe of an all-dominating media frenzy, and consequently, painterly-reflexive island worlds of visual sensibility.
They are provocative havens of tranquility.
A form of objective blurriness, in which the moment in time can penetrate and express itself, occurs in the transitional and fusion zones.
There are two parallel endeavors in Bettina Rave’s paintings, which continue to manifest themselves in her most recent works, “on the one hand, the ever more insistent force of the space to want to perceive the entire space as ‘image’ and on the other hand an impulse to move in more closely, to want to stop time, to pay homage to the sublime in a contemporary manner,” as she so sensitively describes them.
Closer up embodies a counterpoint to her large-scale pixel spaces and their aleatory possibilities of dealing with space individually, but moving closer up, with all the detailedness intimated to us, equally strives for a space-consuming evolve-ment.
In these works, we experience painting as a plastic expression of emotional closeness.