7/28/2019 FAZ 8. Jan. 2012 Niklas Maak on Gardens of Pleasure by Jorinde Voigt Edition Klosterfelde English

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 8. Januar 2012, Nr. 1, Kunstmarkt p. 47 / By Niklas Maak

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Image Fragments in the Language of LoveJorinde Voigt is one of the most significant artists of her generation. It is nowpossibleto see her latest work in Berlin a score about Chinese art.

Before recognising anything, we are aware of turbulence, movement, although it is impossible

to locate the exact source something like a sudden gust of wind. The various skin-coloured

fragments, our eyes seeking but never finding a reference point for them in the object world,

seem to have been thrown out of order and whirled about at the same time, they appear to

form a network connected by fine lines; to have been woven into a web or sewn together. We

get the impression we have been transported to a surgeons operating table, or to the workbench

of an archaeologist trying to create order from diverse fragments. But what do these

fragments represent, what do they mean?

The largest of the skin-coloured elements appears most likely to betray its source: the pattern

for Jorinde Voigts cycle of drawings is Ferdinand Bertholets collection of erotic Asian art

dating from the 16th to 20th century, which could be seen in the Berlin exhibition Der

chinesische Lustgarten.

Adopting a strictly formal approach at first, Voigt sorted all the elements of this painting

according to colours the black hairstyles, the uncovered body parts and cut out their

contours from paper of a corresponding shade. The individual image components were

disassembled as if in a construction kit arranged according to colours. What emerged was a

kind of material storehouse for a narration of love a storehouse, whose forms are asamorphous, formless, chaotic and metabolic as the subject they depict. In a second step, this

store of informal fragments is located within the world: the complex, dynamic systems of lines

mark geographical and wind directions, as well as rotations.

But why? It is necessary to examine Jorinde Voigts aesthetic system of pictorial worlds for a

little longer in order to understand this mysteriously beautiful deconstruction. Jorine Voigt

became known for drawings, often more than two metres high, whose turbulent notations and

curves when seen from a distance they resemble diagrams of flight paths, dance steps or

networking systems can be read as abstract world-images: the wind that blows, the cars that

drive past, music that we hear, films that we see everything that is visible and tangible, that

makes noises, or changes our perceptions of time and space is translated into graphic structural

models. The format of the images is often that of history paintings, and indeed that is what they

are at heart as graphic world-recording machines, they concentrate into cryptic codes all the

phenomena and atmospheres that shape our contemporary world.

It is perhaps no coincidence that Jorinde Voigt is now taking a keen look at Asian art; even in

her early works there was an echo of John Cages Ryoanji drawings and references back to a

Japanese pictorial tradition in which writing, symbols and drawing, the legible and the visible,

relate to each other in different ways to the same elements in European art. First and foremost,

Voigts new cycle is about how we see images: what finds a way to the eye and why and

what happens then? Our eyes attempt to identify forms; they cut separate elements from the

7/28/2019 FAZ 8. Jan. 2012 Niklas Maak on Gardens of Pleasure by Jorinde Voigt Edition Klosterfelde English

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 8. Januar 2012, Nr. 1, Kunstmarkt p. 47 / By Niklas Maak

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dense mass of objects.

In an informal pre-linguistic way, they read colours as the bearers of information, like a text:

skin-tone is a signal that evokes complete narratives. Cy Twombly was a master of this use of

colour; he too had the bacchanal, free form of skin-colours light upon mysterious codes, which

resembled the attempts of craftsmen or scientists to bring order into the turbulence ofphenomena. That is what Jorinde Voigt does as well. A graphic score unfolds around the cutouts:

wind, rotation, time and space; form and the dissolution of form in acceleration: these are

the formal poles between which her works develop, between which they disassemble the

strange cultural and temporal pictorial world once devoted to the sphere of love. Or rather, in

other words: to fetch this world into our present. For the information about wind, the location,

increasing rotations, makes the drawings look like a construction plan for the reconstruction of

that distant Chinese emotion expressed in the old pictures in the present day. And their beauty

lies in this present visualisation.

Bildunterschrift:

Erotic Asian works of art provide the model for Jorinde Voigts series of pictures Garden of

Pleasure, 2011.The five surface prints have been worked on with ink; they each measure 51 x

36 cm and were produced at the Tabor Presse (edition of 12: each 5,000 Euros).