Lothar Romain Interspacetime - Pictures of an Exhibition

Catalogue Bergeversetzen (Movingmountains), Heidelberger Kunstverein 2002

"...In 1991, on her visit to S.M.I.P ranch in Norther California, because of a misinformation she had only very few painting materials and tools with her and few possibilities of equipping herself on the spot. And so, on long walks through the primordial, nearly untouched landscape, nature herself became a reservoir: Grasses. mosses, bird feathers, charred bark, adobe clay were chosen to supplement oil pastels as art materials.The series thus created at the ranch is composed of pictorial creations made from and in landscape, appropriate to the materials used, without overrating or fetishizing the materials. They do not announce any nature religion or animism, although neither do they suppress associations with them. Earth and sky, the sun, which illuminates the black imprint of a human head, captured by the likewise black imprints of the person´s hands and feet. The coyote, also present as a concept within the picture, who trots along his path as if on an arc that could lead past the horizon. Here, realities of the landscape and internal images interlock, often against a background of cracked, brown clay, or contoured with rather open, sketch-like strokes of color. They are put down as both a reminder and a sketch of a landscape, and in their crude openness they represent a penetrating, unforgettable scenario between actual nature, which transform itself within the picture to a sign, and pictorial sign, which becomes nature in its own right - at any rate, far from all searching for pure representation, and equally far from wanting to dissolve into sublimation everything primordial that has been overlaid with the mythical..."


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"But FRANEK´s material", writes Joachim Sartorius, "does not only consist of what she has collected on trips and hikes in the world at large; it is also what she has found in reading journeys through the mythology of creation." He regards all the pictures as "small cosmogenies". This is demonstrated not only by concepts, or even texts, which occur again and again in the pictures of the artist and are attributed to signs and thus integrate word and object-sign, spirit and body or matter as two elementary categories of our understanding of the world and its representation. In general terms, it is also shown by the pictotial translation of this relationship network of different forms of existence, understood as a whole.

That which was noted for ALASKA is true of the whole: FRANEK´s pictures dissolve the familiar orders that can be described with up and down, back and front, near and far..."

Lother Romain: Interspacetime - Pictures of an Exhibition. In: Movingmountains, Heidelberger Kunstverein 2002


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