Painting as a Navigation of space
The exploration of space is a major concern of my work as an artist, whether in architecture, video, social sculpture or in painting. Space in itself doesn’t exist. It is rather an abstract description of our environment in regards to culture, geography, politics, economy or language. Speaking about space mostly refers to the physical space defined by two opposing planes. Such a space possesses a volume that can be described as a hollow or solid volume, as an opposition of a positive and negative form. The space does define itself through "inside" and "outside". Solid, it does not only carry an imprint of its interior but also an imprint of the surrounding space. As much as this formation describes a space within space, my artworks are interwoven into their surroundings. They are imprints of the movement within the society and culture by which they are socialized.
The space I am interested in is not static, material, topographically or physically defined – it is not a container but much more synchronous, overlapping and interleaved. We move in a world of interconnected structures. Space as a network is by far not unfamiliar to us – as in the form of the internet or as the shrinking geographical space of in the age of hyper-mobility. Standing at the top of a 18-story building in downtown Manhattan, I look down on thousands of habitats in which simultaneously everything occurs from birth to death, from love to murder – all imaginable human acting that can happen at one single moment in time.
In the process of painting, I feel I can visualize this simultaneity / concurrence of actions, movements and behaviors and the network of such. A simultaneity of past and future is formed, that appears in front or almost fades away in the subtext. Whereas photography and film plays with the passing, length and measurement of time, painting allows a synchronization and layering of spatial and temporal levels on one single canvas, toppling the linear (narrative) structure we are used to from film and photography.
This process of painting does not result in the reproduction of pictorial space in a classical sense, but in the creation of space as a rendering of the painting process itself – self-referential, identity-creating spaces are formed.
With my exploration of space I want to create orientation, aid in orientation, establish relations, relate oneself to something …offer basic experiences we only will gain by argument. Everything changes us, every step forward or back, if we sit, lay or stay – everywhere, always, in every single moment we relate always anew with the world around us, within is. I see my work as existing within the art genres in a search for different realities - mental, social, political - in the belief in an artistic space.
“But, after all, the aim of art is to create space – space that Is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.” Frank Stella