Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 8. Januar 2012, Nr. 1, Kunstmarkt p.

47 / By Niklas Maak

Image Fragments in the Language of Love Jorinde Voigt is one of the most significant artists of her generation. It is now possible to 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 as amorphous, 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

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

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 of phenomena. 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).