About / Texts / Peter Herbstreuth

Images in Motion

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Bettina Rave lets time work by itself and relies on the direct view of an individual work, which only gradually takes on volume through lines and textures to become an image.

The lines and shadings at first appear abstract. They wait for a view to touch on them and transform the network of lines and hues.

The object before our eyes becomes an individual image for each viewer. Just as words evoke ideas, like fairy-tale frogs becoming fabulous princes, Rave’s textures awaken images of landscapes.

The transformation is sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden, but always unforeseen. Her works require an enhancing view in order to be.

And it is this dialogical principle that thoroughly governs all of Bettina Rave’s works.

When images possess an artistic spark, they literally leap out of the picture frames. The material structures of the physical objects (wood frames mounted with canvas) are massive and heavy, and possess their own intrinsic values. The painting on them is fleeting in its colors, light in its soft flow and atmospheric in its spatially predominant use of blue. Contrasts make the sensory view dynamic.

IN A DRAWING.

In the last few years, Bettina Rave has carried out the models for her works in a series of small-scale, small-part drawings. They also guide the imagery of the painting.

Each drawing is animated by principles of analogy and evocation, and is a visual stimulus consisting of assumptions made by the viewer that he or she cannot hold onto with any real certainty.

However, it is precisely this vagueness, which grants an act of seeing and its accompanying associations. The viewer cannot say more about the reality of a specific image than that it permits his or her relationship to this reality.

Such a pictorial constitution may come from the insight that the image of reality has little in common with reality, and that the image of a landscape says little about the dominate reality of an area shown.

Consequently, the artist leaves impressions and visual data, and creates a field rich in allusion that provides validity for another reality.

This is also true of her drawings. At first, she seems to paraphrase Cy Twombly’s work in Rome and New York City from the late 1960s, while at once illustrating the differences through her own construction of the imagery. Initially, we recall the scriptural, scattering and decentralization.

We do not think of landscapes. Above is grayish black density, below windblown expanses, with the horizon between them. Soot-blackened circles and ellipses evoke the notion of a sky.

Bright, autonomous circular movements from left to right conjure the idea of open space.

Images in Motion

Page 1/3

Bettina Rave lets time work by itself and relies on the direct view of an individual work, which only gradually takes on volume through lines and textures to become an image.

The lines and shadings at first appear abstract. They wait for a view to touch on them and transform the network of lines and hues.

The object before our eyes becomes an individual image for each viewer. Just as words evoke ideas, like fairy-tale frogs becoming fabulous princes, Rave’s textures awaken images of landscapes.

The transformation is sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden, but always unforeseen. Her works require an enhancing view in order to be.

And it is this dialogical principle that thoroughly governs all of Bettina Rave’s works.

When images possess an artistic spark, they literally leap out of the picture frames. The material structures of the physical objects (wood frames mounted with canvas) are massive and heavy, and possess their own intrinsic values. The painting on them is fleeting in its colors, light in its soft flow and atmospheric in its spatially predominant use of blue. Contrasts make the sensory view dynamic.

IN A DRAWING.

In the last few years, Bettina Rave has carried out the models for her works in a series of small-scale, small-part drawings. They also guide the imagery of the painting.

Each drawing is animated by principles of analogy and evocation, and is a visual stimulus consisting of assumptions made by the viewer that he or she cannot hold onto with any real certainty.

However, it is precisely this vagueness, which grants an act of seeing and its accompanying associations. The viewer cannot say more about the reality of a specific image than that it permits his or her relationship to this reality.

Such a pictorial constitution may come from the insight that the image of reality has little in common with reality, and that the image of a landscape says little about the dominate reality of an area shown.

Consequently, the artist leaves impressions and visual data, and creates a field rich in allusion that provides validity for another reality.

This is also true of her drawings. At first, she seems to paraphrase Cy Twombly’s work in Rome and New York City from the late 1960s, while at once illustrating the differences through her own construction of the imagery. Initially, we recall the scriptural, scattering and decentralization.

We do not think of landscapes. Above is grayish black density, below windblown expanses, with the horizon between them. Soot-blackened circles and ellipses evoke the notion of a sky.

Bright, autonomous circular movements from left to right conjure the idea of open space.