Konrad Fischer Galerie is delighted to present the new series of works “BOU“ by Jan Dibbets.
His “Color Studies”, first exhibited at the Konrad Fischer Galerie in 1976, served as starting material. Dibbets has extracted a detail measuring 2 x 4 mm from these – originally parts of colored, reflecting car bodies – and transformed it beyond recognition with the help of a computer program. The command to the computer to apply magnification beyond the maximum pixel format ends in the final depiction of incorrect digital information. The allocation of color, the chromatic selection is again the artist's decision. Paying farewell to the classic studio picture, the presentation is variable: horizontal, vertical or upside down.
KIJKEN – Rudi Fuchs
Picture puzzle
By chance, Jan Dibbets’s computer program produced not pixel clusters but strings and clumps of form. These images came literally out of nowhere.
On this page, there are two digital prints by Jan Dibbets. As far as the graphic image and the distribution of colours are concerned, the two prints resemble each other. On the left is Picture 1, as hung on the wall in an exhibition at a gallery in Berlin. So, in the normal practice of exhibiting art, that is supposedly the correct version of the work. Picture 2, on its right, is the same print but upside down. Now it is by no means the intention to compare the two images, by searching, as we used to do with two almost-identical cartoons with all manner of hard-to-spot differences hidden in them. You had to search for those differences: for example, a cigar with the smoke curling in a slightly different way in one picture and the other. That was realism. In the newspaper or magazine, it was called ‘spot the difference’. However, the two images here have not been placed side by side to create a puzzle, but as a test situation. Picture 2, according to the usual way of looking at art, is incorrectly positioned upside down.
Essentially, this inversion results in a difference in the graphic image between one picture and the other. We can see that, of course, but it is the differences in the mobility of form that are indescribable. They elude language. If I look quietly and attentively at my test situation, I do see differences but they are differences that are of little significance to the print.
I went to visit Dibbets at his studio. Such confusions of shapes had arisen when he was working with computer programmers to search for new intensities of colour. This was what he had encountered. The program unexpectedly started to run wild. Instead of pixel clusters, those strings and clumps of form appeared – roughly like the digital prints on this page. Dozens of them were lying around on his work table. He looked at them and placed them in various positions. That was how he discovered that it did not matter how they lay or would hang on the wall. The creation and appearance of these prints literally originated in an unfathomable void. Normally an artist uses his material to give shape to colours so that an image develops. In Dutch, this design process is called vormgeving, literally ‘form-giving’. The artist’s own signature touch is involved. This is the movement that turns the ‘form-giving’ into form. The form is made with the hand and the eye. We see this happening in Herfst (Autumn), Edgar Fernhout’s extremely patient painting in yellow and white. Compare that with Dibbets’s digital print. We see in the painting that the force of the artist’s gradually applied signature touch has resulted in a depiction that looks robust. The surface has a quiet weight. That was how Fernhout perceived the weather in autumn. The artist’s touch calmly moves to reflect that perception. The landscape has a certain weight. The yellow has atmosphere and so the painting gains a natural top and bottom.
In Dibbets’s print, there is not a trace left of art made by hand. There is a strange tumbling of patches and strings. But these are not lightly swirling autumn leaves in a gentle breeze. There is simply something swirling there. It depends on how you look at it. The print has four sides and can hang in four ways. The graphic image is light in form and ethereal in colour. That is because, in this image, there was no force at all involved in creating the form. You could also call it autumn or rippling water or whatever you choose. But what we are seeing has come out of nowhere. The forms and the colours have no meaning because they cannot be traced back to anything – which is why we have no idea how such graphic images come into being. In Fernhout’s painting, we can see from the signature style how it began and how it continued. It was autumn. The painting is a depiction – and that is how people like to see their art. Some friends sent me a poem by the artist Willem Hussem: set the blue / of the sea / against the blue of the / sky sweep / the white / of a sail / into it and the / wind rises. In other words, throughout history art has always had a kind of enchantment. Painters swept their paint; photographers chose their position. The mobility of the form in Dibbets’s prints is actually everything at once and accessible to every imagination. These are movements and confusions that may have lasted only a fraction of a second when they came about. It was perhaps just by chance that they stood still for a moment. It seems as if the movement is still going on. Dibbets had them printed because he could not take his eyes off them. These prints will always exist. It is up to us to learn how to deal with them, just as one hundred years ago we had to learn to deal with abstract art.
PS Some of these new works by Jan Dibbets will be exhibited until 28 March at the Konrad-Fischer-Galerie in Berlin
