Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
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She also focuses on the dialectic between image and material in her paintings. In the oil paintings of the series “Suchlauf” (Scan Mode, 1998-2005), for example, at first glance we see natural phenomena, like the sky or meadows, characterized by different weather conditions. These, however, are always permeated by a series of strips. Similar to a “running” video, where the viewer sees through the strips (so-called “dropouts”) to the bare material, i.e. to the magnetic tape, Bettina Rave also uses these omissions to open the view in her paintings onto the picture support itself.
It is often the basic substances of creation, the archaic materials from which the world is made, which Bettina Rave turns into the subject matter of her pictures: sky, water, nature, stars. These basic substances are compared to the basics of art: Image supports like canvas, celluloid, magnetic tapes and paints, canvas base coats or lenses, through which light can depict film footage (similar to the retina of human eye).
In her video “Bruit Blanc” the brittle Romanticism of the fuzzy black-and-white images showing swaying reed field is orchestrated with a soundtrack. At first a threatening digital sound cluster can be heard, conjuring up associations to sounds of storms and wind.
A digitally-altered cacophony of voices is added, which is slowly equalized, and finally turns out to be a list of paint colors enumerated by one male voice.
The names of the paints being read (in German) become more and more clearly understandable in equal measure to the picture becoming more indistinct: “Alizarin Krapplack hell, Tube zu fünfzehn Milliliter neun Mark neunundfünfzig, Tube zu fünfunddreißig Milliliter fünfzehn Mark neunzig, Alizarin Krapplack Mittel …” (light Alizarin Madder lake, fifteen milliliter tube for nine marks fifty-nine, thirty-five milliliter tube for fifteen marks ninety, medium Alizarin Madder lake …), etc. As we will learn in the credits, these are lists of products stocked by the company H. Schmincke & Co., which sells paints for artists.
Over this reading, a female voice soon becomes audible, at first very indistinct. She recites Arthur Rimbaud’s famous poem “Bateau Ivre,” a Surrealistic flood of images made of words that becomes increasingly more understandable, while the video image becomes graphically more and more abstract, and slowly falls apart. Until there are no more video signals left at all, and only the white noise that gave the video its name can be seen on the screen.
In the video “Saudade” (1995) the camera is set in close proximity to natural phenomena, such as water, whitecaps on waves or pieces of ice in a wintry sea, which detach the filmed natural phenomena from their overall context, turning them into details.
Consequently, they are no longer easily recognizable as realistic reproductions (which, in reality, they are in fact), but initially appear like abstract patterns and structures in motion. Only after a while is the viewer’s imagination able to properly order the details.
“Saudade’s” method of radically enlarging details, generating its own formal language, and turning the relationships between the notions of concrete and abstract, realistic and surrealistic upside down, can be found again in Bettina Rave’s installation “Querfeldein” (Off-Road, 1998-99) – this time transferred to painting.
The installation consists of 64 individual images, 30×40 centimeters each. It gives off the overarching effect of an Impressionistic base kit of natural phenomena and their impressions: Sky, clouds, meadows, muddy earth tones. They allow themselves to be hung and combined arbitrarily. No image hierarchy places the individual objects of the installation into relationship with each other.
Beyond Seeing – Canvas, Magnetic Tape, Digital Medium
Page 2/4
She also focuses on the dialectic between image and material in her paintings. In the oil paintings of the series “Suchlauf” (Scan Mode, 1998-2005), for example, at first glance we see natural phenomena, like the sky or meadows, characterized by different weather conditions. These, however, are always permeated by a series of strips. Similar to a “running” video, where the viewer sees through the strips (so-called “dropouts”) to the bare material, i.e. to the magnetic tape, Bettina Rave also uses these omissions to open the view in her paintings onto the picture support itself.
It is often the basic substances of creation, the archaic materials from which the world is made, which Bettina Rave turns into the subject matter of her pictures: sky, water, nature, stars. These basic substances are compared to the basics of art: Image supports like canvas, celluloid, magnetic tapes and paints, canvas base coats or lenses, through which light can depict film footage (similar to the retina of human eye).
In her video “Bruit Blanc” the brittle Romanticism of the fuzzy black-and-white images showing swaying reed field is orchestrated with a soundtrack. At first a threatening digital sound cluster can be heard, conjuring up associations to sounds of storms and wind.
A digitally-altered cacophony of voices is added, which is slowly equalized, and finally turns out to be a list of paint colors enumerated by one male voice.
The names of the paints being read (in German) become more and more clearly understandable in equal measure to the picture becoming more indistinct: “Alizarin Krapplack hell, Tube zu fünfzehn Milliliter neun Mark neunundfünfzig, Tube zu fünfunddreißig Milliliter fünfzehn Mark neunzig, Alizarin Krapplack Mittel …” (light Alizarin Madder lake, fifteen milliliter tube for nine marks fifty-nine, thirty-five milliliter tube for fifteen marks ninety, medium Alizarin Madder lake …), etc. As we will learn in the credits, these are lists of products stocked by the company H. Schmincke & Co., which sells paints for artists.
Over this reading, a female voice soon becomes audible, at first very indistinct. She recites Arthur Rimbaud’s famous poem “Bateau Ivre,” a Surrealistic flood of images made of words that becomes increasingly more understandable, while the video image becomes graphically more and more abstract, and slowly falls apart. Until there are no more video signals left at all, and only the white noise that gave the video its name can be seen on the screen.
In the video “Saudade” (1995) the camera is set in close proximity to natural phenomena, such as water, whitecaps on waves or pieces of ice in a wintry sea, which detach the filmed natural phenomena from their overall context, turning them into details.
Consequently, they are no longer easily recognizable as realistic reproductions (which, in reality, they are in fact), but initially appear like abstract patterns and structures in motion. Only after a while is the viewer’s imagination able to properly order the details.
“Saudade’s” method of radically enlarging details, generating its own formal language, and turning the relationships between the notions of concrete and abstract, realistic and surrealistic upside down, can be found again in Bettina Rave’s installation “Querfeldein” (Off-Road, 1998-99) – this time transferred to painting.
The installation consists of 64 individual images, 30×40 centimeters each. It gives off the overarching effect of an Impressionistic base kit of natural phenomena and their impressions: Sky, clouds, meadows, muddy earth tones. They allow themselves to be hung and combined arbitrarily. No image hierarchy places the individual objects of the installation into relationship with each other.