Lea Asja Pagenkemper
"Blacks and Whites" 2014
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Jette Rudolph, Berlin
LEA ASJA PAGENKEMPER
Remote Fate
13 March - 19 April, 2014
The Jette Rudolph Gallery is pleased to present REMOTE FATE, an exhibition of current works by artist Lea Asja Pagenkemper. In her new series of paintings, the artist has elevated the role of word and text by transforming them into essential motifs in her visual representations. What is striking in this transformation is the way she organizes the text into creations that are comprised of visually legible structures. While the words are intentionally arranged in specific sequences that look like rhythmic poems or simple, formal line compositions, the contents of her texts or word sequences undermine the apparent harmony that seems to be imposed by an external order; instead, they confront the viewer aka reader with concepts originating in the domains of the sexual, the personal and the intimate as well as with doubts pertaining to the social and professional worlds.
"Plainly the visual system is persistent, inventive, and sometimes rather perverse in building a world according to its own lights; the supplementation is deft, flexible, and often elaborate." (Nelson Goodman: Ways of Worldmaking, 1978)
Pagenkemper's most recent works allow us to recognize the essential character of her visual creativity and to read it as a conscious and systematic processing and further elaboration of already existing groups of works. Her pictorial creations are almost exclusively dominated by her will to textual structure, which in turn reflects language in terms of artistic visual representation. The artist arranges text fragments that revolve around select key terms and transfers them to the medium of painting. She thereby combines and collapses them until they create a unifying surface - to the point that pictorial form and linguistic content can no longer be identified separately. In her new canvases, large-format panels and works on paper, the artist radically condenses the indefinite sense of place and time that are typically the hallmark of her works, instead privileging the austerity of written structures and the sensual-poetic expressivity of orderly word arrangements. These structures and arrangements are penciled onto pure, unprimed canvas, or they're drawn in white chalk on wooden panels painted with pitch black blackboard lacquer, or yet again they appear as charcoal transfers on rag paper. As in her previous paintings, the appearance and significance of her motifs are determined by her work strategies of applying layers upon layers, of blurring and smudging, of erasing and superimposing new writing, and by her handling of repetitive sets of phrases; it is these strategies that give to her motifs the pervasive appearance of a temporality that is visibly in-process.
Accepting the artificial order imposed by the character of the tableau, Pagenkemper amplifies the range of possibilities available to mimetic panel painting within these confines by adding the potential for the panels' pure readability and visibility: Unlike Leon Battista Alberti's model of painting as opening 'a window to the world,' these text-works create descriptive, visual apparatuses that are like open rooms, spatial enclosures without a center but furnished with a variety of entrances and exits. Beyond the limits of specifiable location and chronology, these text fragments keep constantly producing new organizational structures, thereby creating for themselves an imaginary deep space that is the effect of their visual scaling and stylistic variation.
For the 'Typo Drawings,' handmade text-prints on paper, Pagenkemper literally uses the written word as material. In other words, she uses the process of transferring the text to the picture's surface to create tangible, meaningful points of emphasis. When you first look at the various visual ornaments, the letters look like they have been subsumed by the design principle, but the text-pictures - with their strings of letters and word fragments - very intentionally express specific statements and assertions. "For a subject, it is about touching upon a truth amidst all uncertainty and in giving that which is touched upon form, language." (Marcus Steinweg: Behauptungsphilosophie, 2006)
Pagenkemper doesn't shy away from provocation. It is as if the artist's means of expression is not the pictorial motif but the word. Because, as Michel Houellebecq reminds us: "Believe in structure. Believe in the ancient metrics, equally. Rhyme and rhythm are powerful tools for the liberation of the inner life" (Michel Houellebecq: To Stay Alive, 1999). Moreover, they can be sexist or pornographic and they can even be a direct accusation against the person looking at them. Absurd wordplays also pop up: "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." Pagenkemper uses provocation as a way to release and liberate feelings, which in turn "(...) override the causal chain; one's feelings are the only thing that allow one to perceive what's going on inside; communicating this perception is the object of writing." Lastly, according to French writer Houellebecq, it is love and passion alone that allow purified objects to appear in all their clarity; that make their crystalline truth visible
(Michel Houellebecq: To Stay Alive, 1999).
Galerie Jette Rudolph
Strausberger Platz 4
10243 Berlin
Germany
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Galerie Jette Rudolph
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