| Andreas
Fiedler: A group of works that you have created in recent months
is entitled "Holiday Paintings." What do you mean by that,
and why did you group these works under that title?
Pascal Danz: The impulse came from media images that I saw
during my holiday in a Sardinian newspaper. The editing of the photos
was so bad - in terms of reader-friendliness - that it could call the
newspaper's aim to convey information seriously into question.
From an artistic or cognitive psychological perspective, though, the
pictures, reduced to a few grid points, certainly attracted my interest.
I sorted the pictures into those with a content that interested me,
and others that involuntarily depicted formal absurdities.
You obviously choose picture models because of the information they
contain. So which pictures interested you in the papers in Sardinia?
My interest was mainly caught by the frequently occurring pictures
of projected construction and industrial zones. These places are no
longer landscape and not yet urban; they are in-between places in the
midst of transformation. For me, these industrial zones immediately
evoked the image, or the status, of painting. Painting as a place of
transformation, of shifting perceptions, of openness and of "neither-nor."
Phew, what do you mean exactly... by "painting as a place of
transformation"?
Painting is a possible place and a possible medium for translating,
converting "things" in the broadest sense. Transform means,
first of all, to convert, to take something from one state into another
one. Or transformation can also mean that your own perception becomes
disjointed, unsettled or more focused - in this case, because of a purposeful
shift in the medium of painting. Painting is only one of many such places,
but it is specifically the one I have chosen. When I speak of painting
as a place, I don't mean the canvas as the carrier of painting, but
rather painting as a mental structure, as a mental location. Then the
canvas is merely a possible surface of projection, but not necessarily
the place itself.
As I see it, painting is primarily temporary, a possibility. In this
sense, it is not a response to something, but rather an approach across
uncertain ground. That is also the reason for the example with the industrial
zones: places that are untouched, in other words still "nature"
in a certain sense, possess a potential for change. The possibility
that something may tip from nature into culture (culture here as a developed
area) is very similar to the potential of painting. Nothing stands on
firm ground, something subsequent is inscribed into everything, it is
all no longer or not yet.
In other words, you see the chosen motif of the industrial zone as
"depicting" the status of painting as well. Can you explain
a bit more about this connection?
A piece of land is nature, untouched, uncultivated. Then because
of a resolution, this plot of land is transformed, for example, from
an agricultural zone to an industrial zone. On the outside, this plot
of land has not yet changed very much because of the re-zoning resolution.
Nevertheless, it has still become something entirely different: now
the potential for change is inherent to it, or even the probability
of change. Yet this change is still just a model, not reality. For me,
this possibility for change is a shift of perception. It is possible
that this plot of land will remain in an unchanged state for decades
to come, or it could be dug up next week by construction machines: that
is the point. The point is the fear of a loss of security, but also
a curiosity about what is possible. The point is that things may not
be as they seem. As a product, painting moves toward the surface, but
painting as a place moves somewhere in between, in front or behind,
before or after - in a vague area.
In this sense, painting as a place of transformation is perhaps also
a place of failure: on the one hand because it can provide no security,
but only possibilities, on the other because , as a painter, I can only
fail through the desire to create something that is true or definitive.
Many of the works from the series "Holiday Paintings" are
characterized by a dull shade of yellow.
I decided to keep all the paintings in a shade of yellow, because the
picture material represents a clearly defined period of time (holiday
in Sardinia) and a clearly defined location (the island). Yellow is
the color of quarantine: the image of a ship in the harbor, a floating
island, the flag as a sign of quarantine, a coerced community for a
limited time, a prison. In these works, the color thus also bears the
contents, probably even to a greater degree than the depicted motifs
themselves. The color is intended to indicate temporality, a clearly
defined time period, the beginning and the end. On the one hand, the
title "Holiday Paintings" is a reference to this temporality,
on the other to the reference location of the pictures, the source of
the pictures in a way. It is also clearly ironically intended, because
there is a suggestion of Sunday paintings in it, too, evoking plein
air painting and conveying a sense of pleasure and leisure time.
With the exhibition title "copy and paste", you already
indicate something of your working method.
Both terms are taken from the field of digital image processing,
but they are also used, for example, in the procedures of digital music
production. This pair of terms denotes - in brief - the action that
is referred to as "sampling." That means: copying elements
(copy) and inserting them in a different place (paste). It is duplication
in the production of images, in other words, a fragmentation and re-composition.
Something new is created with existing elements.
The terms "copy" and "paste" actually correspond
to a part of my way of working. My starting material for image production
is second-hand.
This is a crucial point for your work in general. The point of departure
for your painted pictures is almost exclusively other images conveyed
through media. By using mediated models, you reflect the production
and reception conditions for these image media. The traditional means
of painting is used to investigate an acutely topical phenomenon: the
image of "world" conveyed through the media, that seems to
elude any direct experience.
Actually, I regard everything as an "image." For me, the
way the image is created is merely secondary. What is essential is the
unsettling effect, the irritation or perhaps even the fascination that
an image can cause. In my case, in particular, it is often the "sources
of error" in the picture itself that trigger this.
So the "image errors" that you mention in the models flow
into your painting.
When you activate these error sources, so to speak, in a way, you transport
aesthetic characteristics from newspaper or computer images to the medium
of painting. With this way of fixing the images, you open up a differentiated
view of other possibilities for generating images. How important is
this aspect to you?
I am interested in all the different forms and varieties of image generation,
and I have no inhibitions about using them. Naturally, I would like
to direct the viewer's gaze back to the original medium and perhaps
hone perceptional capability in this way. Yet I think it is not usually
a matter of reflecting the gaze and directing it back to exactly the
medium that first caught my attention. The mirror is not an ordinary
mirror, but a distorted one. It is probably more a matter of unsettling
the recipient and making them think: "I've seen that somewhere
before..." It involves transferring the archive: from the public
to the supposedly private.
As we all know, image generation happens at an increasing speed and
with increasing arbitrariness. My works are also attempts to filter
out single images and give them an autonomous status again. This can
be done with minimal interventions (displacement of color, excerpts
or omissions). One example of this might be the picture "M¸nchen."
All the possibilities for generating images are important, and for me
it is imperative that I become aware of the conditions of these image
sources. Yet I don't want to set the forms of image generation in competition
with one another - they all serve one another in the sense of expanding
the gaze.
You mention an "autonomous status" that you give back to
a picture. What do you mean by that?
Autonomous simply means free, independent or self-sufficient. In this
sense, I could perhaps say that I want to give a picture the status
of an original or a one-of-a-kind. This is related in particular to
my work with models that are taken from multiplicatory media. They become
stand-ins for something other than themselves.
When I said original before, what I mean regarding media models is not
the precursor of the original, but rather a new original. Thus autonomy
means separating a "used" or "accelerated" image
from its context and transforming it into a fixed image. That means
turning it into an image that primarily refers to itself and only has
itself as a context. Although an autonomous image may certainly indicate
its reference, that must not be its purpose. It should primarily lead
back to itself as a "self-reflecting something."
This pictorial self-reflection seems to be constitutive for your
painting. This topicalizes the difference between the medium and the
image. If we are aware of the extent, to which we encounter the visual
today in mediated form, this difference is crucial. As it has been said
before, each of your pictures originates from another picture. So your
painting reacts to the existence of the image worlds of the technical
media, especially photography, and thus it does not establish a relationship
to unmediated reality, but rather to the mediating media. The visual
aspect of technical images is reconceived using the means of painting,
so that it is opened up for a different perspective.
I only partly agree with you, when you say that my painting does
not react to unmediated reality, but rather to the image worlds of technical
media. It is precarious to phrase that so absolutely. Of course I react
with painting, and I try to grasp the technical manifestations of images
with it in a new way. However, I don't want to exclude a relationship
to unmediated reality so crassly. The reality "image" is one
thing, the reality of a "story" it is based on is another.
Although it is not present to the same degree, it should certainly not
be left out altogether. To put it more simply: my intention is not solely
to open up new perspectives using painting, to look at or perceive the
image in a new way, but rather to elucidate the "story", to
delineate, to grasp the concept of memory - and the "story"
behind the images is part of this.
Yet your work is fundamentally characterized by an approach to reality
that is mediated, filtered through the view from various media.
Yes, but I don't react solely to the "technically reproduced
image", but rather to the "technically reproduced image of
unmediated reality." Take the work "School", for example.
The model for the picture is a photograph that was compressed for the
Internet, a digital image, in other words. I am interested in different
factors here: for one thing, the appearance of the image, the strange
picture aesthetic of the new medium of the Internet. For another, though,
this image remains what it was before: a documentary picture of a place,
which was the scene of a shooting involving school children. I am just
as interested in this document as in the generated image. I am not so
much concerned with the sensational story behind it, as in the loss
of innocence, the moment of crossing a boundary. I am concerned with
the angles, perspectives and positions of the viewers - as those who
act or as those who are acted upon. In this case, it seems obvious to
me that I have to exclude everything that is personal from the picture
and force neutrality into it - so that the sensation is transitory as
such and the action is transported to a meta-level: specifically, where
the static becomes unbearable and therefore action has to be produced.
The recipient becomes agent and director simultaneously - in a story
that no longer has anything to do with me or the initial situation of
my work. Here the image is a multiplicator. The projections are self-sufficient.
translated by Aileen
Derieg
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