Timely Images
Page 2/4
Are images still copies of nature today, or only decipherable on the basis of codices and in recognition of the structures created by the worlds of new media? Are we still influenced by the copies of the world or by those that have now been known for a generation as the “second reality?”
Painters create images on canvas in hours, days, or often even weeks or months; slowly, stroke for stroke, coat for coat and part for part; rarely before the eyes of the viewer, because this happens in silence, in the quiet moments of time standing still in the studio – and afterwards these images yield a single entity, a whole.
Thus, as a viewer, I can perceive an entire image in one glance of my eye, since, as someone who has come along later, it is a compact entity to me.
Some painters tell stories with many details and the viewer can and must reassemble the parts of the image, one after another, into their own, new drama. This successful method was established, for example, by Dutch 17th century painting, 19th century Salon Painting, the Surrealists and painters of the Leipzig School today.
However, analogously, there were always painters who envisioned and created a painting as a homogeneous visual field, such as Vermeer in the 17th century or the Impressionists of the late 19th century, the Constructivists, painters of Concrete Art, or contemporary painters of Minimal, monochrome images.
In this case, a painting is intended to seem like its own entity, or perhaps even just a part of a greater whole, which allows no prescribed reading order, no particularization, nor a main emphasis within the visual field.
Not only does Bettina Rave belong to the second group, she takes her inspiration from more than just constructive or monochrome painting. Temporal media, television, video, film – i.e. the whole world of electronic resolution – is an essential starting point for her works.
However, this is only one component of her work, which is lively and has continuously evolved – painting, which focuses on and varies the conditions of painting in the picture field, but also in space, which is to say on a real wall.
In the series “punctum” from 2012, 60 small yogurt containers (each 12.8 cm in diameter), which still visibly show traces of their use as paint containers, are positioned horizontally and perpendicularly on the predefined rectangular wall space, in a free and yet nevertheless fixed system.
A rhythm of colorful points can be seen, spaced across the large white surface. Each viewer combines his or her own compositions and constellations, whose force fields seem to also go beyond the limitations of the wall.
Every image, even if it is as gigantic as this entire wall, is only a microcosm in the great macrocosm of the world to be shaped – reminiscent of the utopias of artists in the 1920s, who wanted to implement their design suggestions in order to realize a new art, for the new architecture, of the new human being – such endeavors were then radically eradicated under Stalin and Hitler.
Timely Images
Page 2/4
Are images still copies of nature today, or only decipherable on the basis of codices and in recognition of the structures created by the worlds of new media? Are we still influenced by the copies of the world or by those that have now been known for a generation as the “second reality?”
Painters create images on canvas in hours, days, or often even weeks or months; slowly, stroke for stroke, coat for coat and part for part; rarely before the eyes of the viewer, because this happens in silence, in the quiet moments of time standing still in the studio – and afterwards these images yield a single entity, a whole.
Thus, as a viewer, I can perceive an entire image in one glance of my eye, since, as someone who has come along later, it is a compact entity to me.
Some painters tell stories with many details and the viewer can and must reassemble the parts of the image, one after another, into their own, new drama. This successful method was established, for example, by Dutch 17th century painting, 19th century Salon Painting, the Surrealists and painters of the Leipzig School today.
However, analogously, there were always painters who envisioned and created a painting as a homogeneous visual field, such as Vermeer in the 17th century or the Impressionists of the late 19th century, the Constructivists, painters of Concrete Art, or contemporary painters of Minimal, monochrome images.
In this case, a painting is intended to seem like its own entity, or perhaps even just a part of a greater whole, which allows no prescribed reading order, no particularization, nor a main emphasis within the visual field.
Not only does Bettina Rave belong to the second group, she takes her inspiration from more than just constructive or monochrome painting. Temporal media, television, video, film – i.e. the whole world of electronic resolution – is an essential starting point for her works.
However, this is only one component of her work, which is lively and has continuously evolved – painting, which focuses on and varies the conditions of painting in the picture field, but also in space, which is to say on a real wall.
In the series “punctum” from 2012, 60 small yogurt containers (each 12.8 cm in diameter), which still visibly show traces of their use as paint containers, are positioned horizontally and perpendicularly on the predefined rectangular wall space, in a free and yet nevertheless fixed system.
A rhythm of colorful points can be seen, spaced across the large white surface. Each viewer combines his or her own compositions and constellations, whose force fields seem to also go beyond the limitations of the wall.
Every image, even if it is as gigantic as this entire wall, is only a microcosm in the great macrocosm of the world to be shaped – reminiscent of the utopias of artists in the 1920s, who wanted to implement their design suggestions in order to realize a new art, for the new architecture, of the new human being – such endeavors were then radically eradicated under Stalin and Hitler.