Jorinde Voigt Superdestination

The Christian Lethert Gallery is pleased to be announcing recent works by artist Jorinde Voigt called Superdestinations (3 September 2010 – 23 October 2010), subsequent to the artist’s previous shows at the Gallery with the titles Matrix & Lemniskate (2008) and Conglomerate (2007).

Jorinde Voigt (born in 1977 in Frankfurt am Main) has been developing conceptual drawings on paper since 2002, referring to them as notations and scores, and which form the core of her multi-faceted oeuvre consisting of photo works, performances, objects and (sound) installations. In her, for the most part, oversized notations, Voigt constructs an ordering system, as complex as it is individual, in order to survey invisible processes in our present day. Whereas in her early drawings Voigt was searching for a way of writing that reacted as dynamically and lively as reality itself, the most recent drawings represent a reduced writing system of drawing-like codes.

The pages display abstract lines that have been spontaneously drawn in colored pencil and scattered across the surface of the paper. The strokes form circles, rectangles, triangles, squares, straight, curvy, and zigzag lines. Only the titles of the works give us any indication of the origin of the notations. This is a concrete fixing of positions using the parameters of form and color, which Voigt synchronizes in Superdestinations: The object viewed is reduced to its simplest basic visual form by the artist at the moment of perception and then noted with the corresponding color. Just as a key on a keyboard produces a specific tone, a colored pencil corresponds to the color scale 1-120 regarding the colorfulness of the respective object. In addition to the location, time also functions as a variable of the image production. Each stroke has been provided with a number that documents the succession of the objects perceived.

It is possible to draw a parallel from Superdestinations to Voigt’s first sketch-like notations. In 2003, the artist traveled to Indonesia, where the three-part series Indonesia was carried out. Voigt used graph paper for the notation of her precise linear arrangement. Sitting in street cafés, she noted in the form of frequencies the sounds of motorbikes passing, the rising wind, Indonesian pop music and passers-by in conversation. Whereas Voigt exclusively dealt with acoustics in Indonesia, in Superdestinations her concern is exclusively for taking an optical inventory of the environment. A further key to the artist’s studies in perception is the Installation Botanic Code, in which Voigt examined her own perception of colors during walks in botanic gardens. According to an algorithm, the most strongly perceived colors, recorded in an order of one to five, are translated into proportional color fields and transferred to aluminum rods. The result is a code, which breaks down the information with respect to color, proportion, performance, time, season and norm.

Botanic Code, as well as Superdestination, translates the human brain’s linear structure of perception into a parallel arrangement. An unusual side-by-side of individual moments comes about, fanning out before our eyes in a simultaneousness of the present. The overlappings and intersections (accumulation) produce a rhythm (interference) that extends throughout Voigt’s drawings. By repeating and varying the same unchanging procedure of notation, the inherent rhythm is pushed on.

In the element ›Horizon‹ the theme of the elementary horizontal line upfolds to the color spectrum of possible horizon colors. The side-by-side of the possible lines results in an idiosyncratic complex of colors, which defines the possible scope of colors. This element bands together in the new works with themes of: melody, caesura, rotation, territory, continental border, center, water, oil, gas, electricity, direction, construction, deconstruction, temporal countdown and count-up loops, position, and double identical position.

Superdestinations is characterized by ambivalences: linearity and nonlinearity, specificity and non-specificity, writing and image. Even though the notations primarily concentrate on self-perception, nevertheless the location is an essential picture subject. As a rule, a location displays specific features of identity, whereas in Voigt’s drawings it is simplified to a homogenous system of lines. The result of this unconventional manner of writing is something unknown. Reminded of children’s, blind or scribbled drawings, we see something not yet defined: It is a stage before the categorization of image and writing. Intuitively, beyond emotion and intellect, the colored abbreviations reveal primal archaic forms of human communication, such as those examined in anthropological and neurological studies.

Lisa Sintermann