Fabscape, 20 pieces, each 30 x 40 cm, mixed media, 1997
Hans Christian Petersen
F A B S C A P E
B Y J Ö R G H A S H E I D E R
Foreword
Often it will be that I will value a work only for the sum of
ideas and fantasies it spawns in me.
Charles Baudelaire
Proposition
Through the voice that is writing to make heard the sound of the
artist to be portrayed and to show his inner field of vision.
Let us take in the beginnings, the early works, to examine his
state of being in a clear light. We see before us a work which
vacillates between the axiom less is more and baroque, intellectual
exhaustion of available means. Symbol calligraphy encounters urban
foundlings material characters communicate with archaic battlefields
digital typography meets the monogram of a rivulets bed a
bold collage between nature and decay begins a discourse with
itself, amidst the writing pertaining to it. And so the preoccupation
with oneself takes on a blood-stained, archetypal dimension. The
user interface of the brain which we see here is a system expanded
by knowledge in order to glean news. Work the semiotic general
store into an etiquette manual of newly structured pages with
universal values. Instead of facile iconolatry, adjust the perfect
plan with pixel ornaments. A Yes inside an emotionally charged
brain, to formatting movements anew because only the means by
which change is brought about will change.
And so this portrait is a word-mask of tatters and image positions
gone wild from this uvre of finely worked proportions and a rehabilitation
of folkloric knowledge. For every organ should at all costs be
freed from this all-engulfing obsession with hysterical now
and be given a proper place to grow.
A work that does not even use common grids. Excavations bound
up in the negative a quilt on which the fairy tale layer is
stitched to the comets tail, a desert melée in old German handwriting,
runes knotted into images of synapses.
Work methods
Give the stringent ghettos a shot of enlightened hard-tackling.
The puck screams on moss, on steel on pixelled
A Yes with souvenirs
of ideas, blissful and drunken drawing up of high-level exercise
lists, safe beneath the pillow, on top wayward dreams and freely
improvised bebop. Next morning at breakfast bury old postcard
reminiscences down below, do away with old philosophies and feed
on new life. Tested the whole ballyhoo with photo shots and sketches,
built it up in conversation and let it fade away. Just keep your
nerves with all the traps, the wrinkles, keep waiting, the snapshots
are the first side wings in the smiths apron. The organic reaction
to the new idea is as yet wobbly, disected, still more trumpet
sounds from other media, streaks in a terminal cerebral land,
still more scribbling of notes out of arbitrary motor activity.
More divisions must be made.
The artist in his foundry of ideas produces thoughts, works, knows
that he is familiar with no more than a tiny fragment of accumulated
civilisation. But does not become morbid. The current stand can
be the subject matter of his shunting yard. He knows his model
railway of codes, he is the signalman of his locomotives, knows
his trains out of casual genius, knows his intents well preserved.
They are still there, the spirits and minds with drawing boards,
whereas one knows that the strands of inspiration are woven in
many ways and cannot be unravelled on demand. And so to gathering
what we have, we have all torn up and layered then, manoeuvred
into aesthetic imagery. To be suspended in ones capabilities
as the fertile producer and to be the products observer all in
one. It is no invention, instead the mobilizer holds the material,
an initial freeze frame with a watermark in time merges into fuzzy
imagery, then the language of the imagery is translated by our
thoughts, is no longer merely a metaphor for the visually orientated
observer. Wring a system out of idle talk, flotsam from our daily
lives becomes the mainstay of a message, cementing the spiritual
component with an almost superstitious obsession. And so, find
fortune, find beauty. Wring some other raw material with writings
from the earth, erosion in the senses, from the visual goggle
box full of cubism and trigger-happy bad rhymes. As a voyeur of
the media he can understand the jokers in the corridors, but these
images should be broken up, with complex conceptual surprises.
Circumnavigate these once again, judge their effect with discolouring,
transcend with technology, and then, final proof of life inside
installed images, polished, engraved, cast.
Fabscape
The artist imagines a non-material work of art, surfing in the
non-linear medium of the net. His hand goes to the mouse finger
pressure, click, a window opens, a limited supply of layers whirls
through the web. Let the following be facts: the silhouette of
the Town Band of Bremen, a symbol level out of alchemy and the
periodic system, genetic codes, thirdly an industrial landscape.
Storeys, stories, periodic or even alchemical courses of events,
glowing codes of bacteria and breeds of dogs on a prefabricated
landscape.
The method
Take the material, the qualities and let them loose all over,
rhythmically, with a sure aim, in auto-reference to eachother.
A construct of ideas whose instruments comprise separation. A
game full of repetition. Seized the insoluble problem of analogous
logical evolution. Inside the loop of auto-references the problem
and its solution become displaced. We receive the answer to an
ever-changing question.
Metal temperament animal. Songs like we can find anything
better than death, anywhere and below, a landscape alternating
between the grid of everyday routine and wild shots plotted into
the blue. The prefabricated picture is expanded here evolution
by bacterial activity at the computer. Elements species metals,
drag, separate and divide into layers to cheat the quarrelling
of the character symbol industry.
Fabscape is a print too, a limited number of possible correlations,
is in its presentation a symbolic panel, fragments of possibilities,
installed within steel frames. When these picture products splash
into the observers dimension, burble overhead with their categorizations,
inhale the raw particles and remix them, they remain observer-in-chief.
However, the image creator remains conspicuous. Somewhere an inaudible
tape would seem to be heard grumbling with the artists last ideas,
would cast a primeval shadow of a commentary, or sometimes only
a sentence which lingers on as an umbilical cord connecting the
first scribblings of ideas at the outset of his work. Yes, first
flotsam on a wobbly table now after its launch, anchors aweigh
a schooner beating to windward there goes a scent which
says: Tourists know not where they have been, travellers know
not where they are bound (Paul Theroux). Ahoi.
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