Timely Images
Page 1/4
Medieval altarpieces tell a life story through several display panels. Consequently, we are able to view still images from the life of Christ or the Virgin Mary in a type of time lapse, and reassemble the individual frames of the overall composition into a whole, as in film.
Since the period when panel painting achieved its own autonomy in the Renaissance, condensed, individual scenes have attracted major interest from their patrons, and consequently all the more attention from artists.
Even if we could determine how subtly this before and after can be incorporated, or be suggested within an apparently uniform scene, nevertheless, the represented duration of an image worthy of representation became increasingly shortened – up until William Turner around 1850, or slightly later with the French Impressionists – when transitoriness of these brief moments became the main focus of the images.
The Futurists around Marinetti, c. 1910, or Marcel Duchamp shortly thereafter, attempted to capture movement and speed in a static image – like synaesthetes who seek connections between the visual arts and music – until cinema was ultimately able to represent a realistic lapse of time and its changes.
In order to capture the dynamic movement of life on static panel paintings, artists have repeatedly sought and found new visual solutions for this apparently irresolvable antithesis.
Bettina Rave has developed diverse pictorial forms for this purpose. In 1991, she included static video images in her series “Cheimon” and “…alles verschwindet” (… everything disappears) as a vertical middle strip or doubled outer strips.
Here, the differing images that are frozen in time were visually reassembled into a seemingly continuous time flow. The viewer can read the images in many ways and they are provided with an open end and/or beginning. The monochrome picture surface contrasts with the real-time details of the still images along the vertical axis.
Bettina Rave’s paintings from the mid-1990s are more uniform in their image structure and simultaneously more complex in the representation of time flow. The titles of the “Shaped Canvas” series from 1994-95 each refer to states of time: “eben” (just now), “gleich” (in a little while), “jetzt” (now), “dann” (then).
A square opening in the painting formats can be associatively correlated to a traditional TV screen and the rectangles can similarly be compared to the current wide screen formats.
The rapidly moving spots of light, forms and clouds, which appear blurred, like a photograph that is out-of-focus, should be differentiated in the three-dimensional levels of brightness of their light blue tones. As representations, they could originate from both real nature as well as technology’s world of reproduction.
Consequently, to our eyes these images of the processes of movement shift between levels of perception and representation, or for instance, from their technical reproduction as video stills or printed images. Bettina Rave has found a quiet, almost meditative form for representing a fundamental problem in the fine arts: Is a work still “like nature” (Paul Klee), which is to say an invention that parallels nature, or instead, should it be considered in terms of its technical reproducibility?
Timely Images
Seite 1/4
Medieval altarpieces tell a life story through several display panels. Consequently, we are able to view still images from the life of Christ or the Virgin Mary in a type of time lapse, and reassemble the individual frames of the overall composition into a whole, as in film.
Since the period when panel painting achieved its own autonomy in the Renaissance, condensed, individual scenes have attracted major interest from their patrons, and consequently all the more attention from artists.
Even if we could determine how subtly this before and after can be incorporated, or be suggested within an apparently uniform scene, nevertheless, the represented duration of an image worthy of representation became increasingly shortened – up until William Turner around 1850, or slightly later with the French Impressionists – when transitoriness of these brief moments became the main focus of the images.
The Futurists around Marinetti, c. 1910, or Marcel Duchamp shortly thereafter, attempted to capture movement and speed in a static image – like synaesthetes who seek connections between the visual arts and music – until cinema was ultimately able to represent a realistic lapse of time and its changes.
In order to capture the dynamic movement of life on static panel paintings, artists have repeatedly sought and found new visual solutions for this apparently irresolvable antithesis.
Bettina Rave has developed diverse pictorial forms for this purpose. In 1991, she included static video images in her series “Cheimon” and “…alles verschwindet” (… everything disappears) as a vertical middle strip or doubled outer strips.
Here, the differing images that are frozen in time were visually reassembled into a seemingly continuous time flow. The viewer can read the images in many ways and they are provided with an open end and/or beginning. The monochrome picture surface contrasts with the real-time details of the still images along the vertical axis.
Bettina Rave’s paintings from the mid-1990s are more uniform in their image structure and simultaneously more complex in the representation of time flow. The titles of the “Shaped Canvas” series from 1994-95 each refer to states of time: “eben” (just now), “gleich” (in a little while), “jetzt” (now), “dann” (then).
A square opening in the painting formats can be associatively correlated to a traditional TV screen and the rectangles can similarly be compared to the current wide screen formats.
The rapidly moving spots of light, forms and clouds, which appear blurred, like a photograph that is out-of-focus, should be differentiated in the three-dimensional levels of brightness of their light blue tones. As representations, they could originate from both real nature as well as technology’s world of reproduction.
Consequently, to our eyes these images of the processes of movement shift between levels of perception and representation, or for instance, from their technical reproduction as video stills or printed images. Bettina Rave has found a quiet, almost meditative form for representing a fundamental problem in the fine arts: Is a work still “like nature” (Paul Klee), which is to say an invention that parallels nature, or instead, should it be considered in terms of its technical reproducibility?