Timely Images
Page 4/4
“Suchlauf” (Scan Mode, 1997-2005) conveys the world of pixel electronics in its title, the world of images behind the electronic color fields, lines and marks. We search in vain for the reality of the subjects, for the stories of the emotions represented. In these images, Bettina Rave has attempted to translate into painting the phenomenon of drop-outs in video. The strips left out of the image provide a view onto lower painting layers.
“Suchlauf” is a sequence of paintings about the various stages of a picturesque image composition. In “Suchlauf (I)” we see the bare canvas through these strips. In “Suchlauf (VII)” we finally look onto the wall on which the painting hangs; the painting consists of six individual, physical objects.
The relatively illusionistic paintings, particularly the sky motifs, are “disillusioned” and clearly exposed as a medium. Nevertheless, “dort” (there) – another painting series title that stands for itself and refers to itself as an image surface reality made up of color fields – is divided into two contrasting picture halves.
Various haptic qualities, compressions and surface tensions allow the image in “dort” to become visible as an object, not as a deceptive “window on the world,” but instead as an artificially created work of art.
The connections to the electronic, scattered, blurred images of a buzzing video image are obvious in “Suchlauf” – just as the realization of the basic idea of the Impressionists (how the world appears in light and hence the surface of things) is chosen as the pictorial theme of “en plein air (II)” from 2007.
Bettina Rave goes a step further in this work, as well. She forms her images as parts of a whole.
Twenty-one different, small images with similar motifs grow into a whole on a wall, which we, however, can only see in these 21 parts. The flow of images is up and down, extended and expandable to the right and to the left – “Into the Red” (also 2007) even extends around the corner of a room onto the adjacent walls.
Bettina Rave’s images, which appear so restrained, are not fuzzy logic or words, but convert the intellectual discourse into sensuous visual images. In this way, she has created one possible form for panel paintings of the electronic age.
Her works make a stimulating connection between the overflowing media world and the static world of images, taking up a position of their own between media and painting. Rave’s images are components of a reality that is newly seen; a self-created world of images: powerful, effective and sensitive.
Timely Images
Page 4/4
“Suchlauf” (Scan Mode, 1997-2005) conveys the world of pixel electronics in its title, the world of images behind the electronic color fields, lines and marks. We search in vain for the reality of the subjects, for the stories of the emotions represented. In these images, Bettina Rave has attempted to translate into painting the phenomenon of drop-outs in video. The strips left out of the image provide a view onto lower painting layers.
“Suchlauf” is a sequence of paintings about the various stages of a picturesque image composition. In “Suchlauf (I)” we see the bare canvas through these strips. In “Suchlauf (VII)” we finally look onto the wall on which the painting hangs; the painting consists of six individual, physical objects.
The relatively illusionistic paintings, particularly the sky motifs, are “disillusioned” and clearly exposed as a medium. Nevertheless, “dort” (there) – another painting series title that stands for itself and refers to itself as an image surface reality made up of color fields – is divided into two contrasting picture halves.
Various haptic qualities, compressions and surface tensions allow the image in “dort” to become visible as an object, not as a deceptive “window on the world,” but instead as an artificially created work of art.
The connections to the electronic, scattered, blurred images of a buzzing video image are obvious in “Suchlauf” – just as the realization of the basic idea of the Impressionists (how the world appears in light and hence the surface of things) is chosen as the pictorial theme of “en plein air (II)” from 2007.
Bettina Rave goes a step further in this work, as well. She forms her images as parts of a whole.
Twenty-one different, small images with similar motifs grow into a whole on a wall, which we, however, can only see in these 21 parts. The flow of images is up and down, extended and expandable to the right and to the left – “Into the Red” (also 2007) even extends around the corner of a room onto the adjacent walls.
Bettina Rave’s images, which appear so restrained, are not fuzzy logic or words, but convert the intellectual discourse into sensuous visual images. In this way, she has created one possible form for panel paintings of the electronic age.
Her works make a stimulating connection between the overflowing media world and the static world of images, taking up a position of their own between media and painting. Rave’s images are components of a reality that is newly seen; a self-created world of images: powerful, effective and sensitive.