Maria Volk / Justus Köhncke
28 Jun - 11 Aug 2012
MARIA VOLK - rabatten vom himmel
JUSTUS KÖHNCKE - System als Schönheit
28 June - – 11 September 2012
Maria Volk - rabatten vom himmel
In her second solo exhibition at Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Maria Volk continues the exploration of the intimate realm of her own psyche through dreams, commenced in her first exhibition. With a technique that involves automatism and swift gestures, she attempts to transfigure abstract mental processes, the fleeting visual details of her dreams and other forays into the subconscious unto the canvas.
The German word Rabatten refers to a garden segments with different genres of flowers or produce. Derived from the French “rebattre” – beat, put down or flip (zurueckschlagen, umschlagen) the title also makes a reference to her own technique: In her large scale figurations, Volk uses a form of printing and stenciling, in which she dabs dots of acrylic and color pigment on sheets of paper, and then presses them onto the nettle cloth. She creates large scale triptychs, where the paper stencils are used over and over again, so that the shapes appear finer, more translucent and more hinted at with every repetition.
Repetition is central to the work, and the constant movement back and forth is also evident in the motifs themselves. The flowers and flower beds, which are drawn in an almost childlike fashion as a big loop with a straight line on the bottom, convey in fact an endless circular movement of the wrist. The beds themselves are angular and jutting into each other, “negative” and “positive”, “female” and “male” like pieces of the DNA.
This trace of a movement inward and outward along the contours reflects the attempt to connect the shards and slivers of memory or bits and pieces of dreams, and to return to a very subjective intimate knowledge that always seems to be fading out or, once attained, merely the tip of something much bigger and endlessly elusive.
While Maria Volk’s motivations and her physical and gestural technique might be very subjective, the pictorial language she creates is objective to the point where it’s almost iconographic. The flower, drawn with one continuous line could almost be a universal icon for flower, and her round Rococo roses are flirting with familiar imagery of romanticized kitsch. However, the ‘unfinishedness’ of the motifs, the feeling that everything we see is a detail of something so much grander it is hardly tangible, is both uncanny and seductive at the same time. It’s an expression of a human necessity of reaching back into a different state of consciousness and creating a bridge between two different ways of being. The challenge is to translate the language of the one that is slightly beyond our reach into the one that we can comprehend in a picture.
Text: Hili Perlson
Justus Köhncke - System als Schönheit
Question: This exhibition revolves around a graphic representation of the history of the computer operating system Unix.
JK: The diagram comes from a “Unix History” Website, managed as a hobby by French software developer Éric Lévenéz. Alongside the diagram’s charming nerd factor and preciseness, I also liked its purely surface-aesthetic view “from a distance”. As Lévenéz is constantly updating the diagram and thus permanently extending the timeline to the right, it is in a perpetual state of change. With its various levels and lines and its arrangement on a temporal axis, the diagram was an ideal candidate for use as a graphic score, just as the pioneers of New Music worked with graphic and illustrative means to break out of the straitjacket of classical notation. Only conversely – here the (if at all) “creative act” consists only in the laying down of rules regarding how the score is to be read and in the technical translation of the graphic information in strict accordance with the set rules into a music synthesis system, while Cage or Stockhausen, for instance, more likely looked for new ways to notate their musical ideas.
How did the transformation into music take place?
It transpired that digital tools were unsuitable for the conversion into musical information. Lévenéz was unfortunately unable to provide us with any tables in “raw data” form, because he has actually been “drawing” the diagram for years on his NeXT workstation(!). Meaning that all events in the diagram labeled with an arrowhead had to be manually entered into the music software.
Yet I can find great pleasure in such mechanical painting-by-numbers activities, precisely because they are so brutally “uncreative” and nonetheless require extreme concentration. Knitting is a similar endeavor: a trance-like flow and mental state can develop after a while, where other thought processes take over in the brain as soon as the primary activity has developed into a kind of automatic loop process.
Its artistic immaculacy also makes this structure beautiful. We could say the structure is unaware of its own aesthetic qualities.
I was indeed delighted by the certain purity the music began to radiate when we were finally able to hear it, a composition in which I am purely a translation module and which is above all determined by numerous other factors – from the way Lévenéz arranges his arrows (which is also based purely on reasons of layout) to, naturally, the actual development of the Unix systems and descendants that today serve, for instance, all Apple devices or Android smartphones. Unix itself is also a very, very beautiful system.
The hi-fi system obviously comes from an earlier age of entertainment technology...
Presenting the music as a one-off steel dubplate on an elevated early 1980s hi-fi system roots the composition in another, fictional world that has absolutely nothing to do with the operating systems that came shortly afterwards.
Interview recorded by Michael Kerkmann
Translation: Jeremy Gaines
JUSTUS KÖHNCKE - System als Schönheit
28 June - – 11 September 2012
Maria Volk - rabatten vom himmel
In her second solo exhibition at Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Maria Volk continues the exploration of the intimate realm of her own psyche through dreams, commenced in her first exhibition. With a technique that involves automatism and swift gestures, she attempts to transfigure abstract mental processes, the fleeting visual details of her dreams and other forays into the subconscious unto the canvas.
The German word Rabatten refers to a garden segments with different genres of flowers or produce. Derived from the French “rebattre” – beat, put down or flip (zurueckschlagen, umschlagen) the title also makes a reference to her own technique: In her large scale figurations, Volk uses a form of printing and stenciling, in which she dabs dots of acrylic and color pigment on sheets of paper, and then presses them onto the nettle cloth. She creates large scale triptychs, where the paper stencils are used over and over again, so that the shapes appear finer, more translucent and more hinted at with every repetition.
Repetition is central to the work, and the constant movement back and forth is also evident in the motifs themselves. The flowers and flower beds, which are drawn in an almost childlike fashion as a big loop with a straight line on the bottom, convey in fact an endless circular movement of the wrist. The beds themselves are angular and jutting into each other, “negative” and “positive”, “female” and “male” like pieces of the DNA.
This trace of a movement inward and outward along the contours reflects the attempt to connect the shards and slivers of memory or bits and pieces of dreams, and to return to a very subjective intimate knowledge that always seems to be fading out or, once attained, merely the tip of something much bigger and endlessly elusive.
While Maria Volk’s motivations and her physical and gestural technique might be very subjective, the pictorial language she creates is objective to the point where it’s almost iconographic. The flower, drawn with one continuous line could almost be a universal icon for flower, and her round Rococo roses are flirting with familiar imagery of romanticized kitsch. However, the ‘unfinishedness’ of the motifs, the feeling that everything we see is a detail of something so much grander it is hardly tangible, is both uncanny and seductive at the same time. It’s an expression of a human necessity of reaching back into a different state of consciousness and creating a bridge between two different ways of being. The challenge is to translate the language of the one that is slightly beyond our reach into the one that we can comprehend in a picture.
Text: Hili Perlson
Justus Köhncke - System als Schönheit
Question: This exhibition revolves around a graphic representation of the history of the computer operating system Unix.
JK: The diagram comes from a “Unix History” Website, managed as a hobby by French software developer Éric Lévenéz. Alongside the diagram’s charming nerd factor and preciseness, I also liked its purely surface-aesthetic view “from a distance”. As Lévenéz is constantly updating the diagram and thus permanently extending the timeline to the right, it is in a perpetual state of change. With its various levels and lines and its arrangement on a temporal axis, the diagram was an ideal candidate for use as a graphic score, just as the pioneers of New Music worked with graphic and illustrative means to break out of the straitjacket of classical notation. Only conversely – here the (if at all) “creative act” consists only in the laying down of rules regarding how the score is to be read and in the technical translation of the graphic information in strict accordance with the set rules into a music synthesis system, while Cage or Stockhausen, for instance, more likely looked for new ways to notate their musical ideas.
How did the transformation into music take place?
It transpired that digital tools were unsuitable for the conversion into musical information. Lévenéz was unfortunately unable to provide us with any tables in “raw data” form, because he has actually been “drawing” the diagram for years on his NeXT workstation(!). Meaning that all events in the diagram labeled with an arrowhead had to be manually entered into the music software.
Yet I can find great pleasure in such mechanical painting-by-numbers activities, precisely because they are so brutally “uncreative” and nonetheless require extreme concentration. Knitting is a similar endeavor: a trance-like flow and mental state can develop after a while, where other thought processes take over in the brain as soon as the primary activity has developed into a kind of automatic loop process.
Its artistic immaculacy also makes this structure beautiful. We could say the structure is unaware of its own aesthetic qualities.
I was indeed delighted by the certain purity the music began to radiate when we were finally able to hear it, a composition in which I am purely a translation module and which is above all determined by numerous other factors – from the way Lévenéz arranges his arrows (which is also based purely on reasons of layout) to, naturally, the actual development of the Unix systems and descendants that today serve, for instance, all Apple devices or Android smartphones. Unix itself is also a very, very beautiful system.
The hi-fi system obviously comes from an earlier age of entertainment technology...
Presenting the music as a one-off steel dubplate on an elevated early 1980s hi-fi system roots the composition in another, fictional world that has absolutely nothing to do with the operating systems that came shortly afterwards.
Interview recorded by Michael Kerkmann
Translation: Jeremy Gaines