Words, Signs and Notations in the Work of Bettina Rave
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Rave’s visual conceptions are always accompanied by personal, very individual associations and memories, as well as the ability to link diverse individual images to one another, to recontextualize and to reanalyze them.
A broadening of the parameters of how viewers see and respond can be perceived in the work uferlos (2003), a series of photograms. The text and image combinations consist of white-toned flowers and excerpts from the German version of the book Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe; originally published in French in 1977) by the semiotician Roland Barthes.
Here, the images are not perceptible simply as text, nor are the texts simply perceptible as images. Instead, there is interplay, an overlapping of text and image that feeds into the suggestive character of Rave’s works.
For all the brevity of these texts on love, however, a poetic charge is carried out by the instantaneous perpetuation of the flowers in the respective photograms, which manages to imply their temporality at the same time.
Rave’s works are free from ideological claims and excesses. In contrast, they have the ability to set memory and thought processes in motion.
Bettina Rave traverses the gap between conceptual art and what has come to be known as “essential painting.” She adds her very own, individual aesthetic experiences and aspirations to these traditions. Very independent and sometimes quite cryptic works result when she uses individual notations such as bar codes or Morse code, as in the four-part love letter, Liebesbrief (2016), an homage to the painter Agnes Martin.
For this purpose, Bettina Rave transferred a text into Morse code. In this conscious minimalization she investigates the image both rationally and emotionally, while being equally conscious that in this case the encoded text also has an inherent audible aspect, one that underscores the visual transformation and its intensity. Her interest in its design is simultaneously an epistemic interest.
Rave’s art can be thoroughly understood as an answer to media “un-reality,” where, in addition to an excess of conveyed information, a striking deficit of direct personal experience and reception can also be found.
The question about the meaning of text—a quickly decipherable sign system—therefore also interestingly re-asks questions about the status of the pictorial and visible, and what now distinguishes them from a normal decipherable text with a text message. Gottfried Boehm, a specialist in the field of visual culture, generally relies on the “intrinsic logic” of images, which produce meaning or have an effect through their specific forms.
Even if some viewers of Rave’s works are at first a little perplexed when faced with their sometimes almost hermetical encryption, they later recognize that these images leave traces in our visual memories long after we have left the exhibition space.
This quality, too, adds to their fascination, while underscoring their autonomy. Bettina Rave’s works prove themselves to be composed of sublime, poetic imagery with a steady grasp of sensory presence.
Words, Signs and Notations in the Work of Bettina Rave
Page 2/2
Rave’s visual conceptions are always accompanied by personal, very individual associations and memories, as well as the ability to link diverse individual images to one another, to recontextualize and to reanalyze them.
A broadening of the parameters of how viewers see and respond can be perceived in the work uferlos (2003), a series of photograms. The text and image combinations consist of white-toned flowers and excerpts from the German version of the book Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe; originally published in French in 1977) by the semiotician Roland Barthes.
Here, the images are not perceptible simply as text, nor are the texts simply perceptible as images. Instead, there is interplay, an overlapping of text and image that feeds into the suggestive character of Rave’s works.
For all the brevity of these texts on love, however, a poetic charge is carried out by the instantaneous perpetuation of the flowers in the respective photograms, which manages to imply their temporality at the same time.
Rave’s works are free from ideological claims and excesses. In contrast, they have the ability to set memory and thought processes in motion.
Bettina Rave traverses the gap between conceptual art and what has come to be known as “essential painting.” She adds her very own, individual aesthetic experiences and aspirations to these traditions. Very independent and sometimes quite cryptic works result when she uses individual notations such as bar codes or Morse code, as in the four-part love letter, Liebesbrief (2016), an homage to the painter Agnes Martin.
For this purpose, Bettina Rave transferred a text into Morse code. In this conscious minimalization she investigates the image both rationally and emotionally, while being equally conscious that in this case the encoded text also has an inherent audible aspect, one that underscores the visual transformation and its intensity. Her interest in its design is simultaneously an epistemic interest.
Rave’s art can be thoroughly understood as an answer to media “un-reality,” where, in addition to an excess of conveyed information, a striking deficit of direct personal experience and reception can also be found.
The question about the meaning of text—a quickly decipherable sign system—therefore also interestingly re-asks questions about the status of the pictorial and visible, and what now distinguishes them from a normal decipherable text with a text message. Gottfried Boehm, a specialist in the field of visual culture, generally relies on the “intrinsic logic” of images, which produce meaning or have an effect through their specific forms.
Even if some viewers of Rave’s works are at first a little perplexed when faced with their sometimes almost hermetical encryption, they later recognize that these images leave traces in our visual memories long after we have left the exhibition space.
This quality, too, adds to their fascination, while underscoring their autonomy. Bettina Rave’s works prove themselves to be composed of sublime, poetic imagery with a steady grasp of sensory presence.