Opening: Saturday, April 6th, 2019, 11am
The artist will be present
In our second exhibition with the artist Joachim Bandau,
we present a selection of watercolor paintings and lacquer works.
The Watercolour Paintings
Linear Transparency - Compression of Space
Joachim Bandau
Basis of my watercolour paintings is the development of different systems of image creation: By this I mean the selection of a certain image-producing module and the work process which results from this. The linear works with their necessary processing steps and the resulting product are precisely planned. The much larger group of aquarelles are based on polyphonic structures. Each individual surface is permitted the greatest possible autonomy. Each new surface is the response to the previous one. These are intuitive arrangements. The individual, situation-related, steps of work suggest improvisation: They surround and intensify the basic subject. These are always decisions ad hoc. What conditions determine the creation of a surface? What role does chance play? Et cetera. The many-sided layering of transparent surfaces emerges from this process. Out of the compression of the surfaces comes a spatial structure which penetrates depth. The image is created from a dialogical relationship between the individual Fields among themselves and me as the artist in action. The path evolves from this work process without a speciFic knowledge of the goal to be achieved. The goal is the result of many work processes whose conclusion is the most difFicult of decisions.
Time is another important dimension of my aquarelles. The individual Fields emerge in a time sequence. I often spend months on a single work. Some have taken several years. The individual layers - more or less readable - document the history of a work. The number of individual steps in creating the work varies from sheet to sheet. Approximately 20 to 40 steps and sometimes even more. Much is concealed and remains undiscovered. The complexity of a work cannot be understood without analytical observation. The observer decodes the work in reverse. He or she experiences the time sequence of the artistic process. Only in time is the viewer able to comprehend the interaction between the individual Fields. Comprehension of this complex pictorial structure leads one to a suggested, sometimes impossible to totally fathom, spatial depth - a changing spatial depth in which the eye is seemingly lost, depending on the angle at which I am viewing the work or the side from which I enter the image.
Translation Florence Richter
From the catalogue: Joachim Bandau, Quodlibet, 2008
