| Wall Installations, Wand Installationen, 1991 - 98 |
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| Wall Installations, Wand Installationen, 1991 - 98 |
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| Gigantic portraits everywhere, on the floor, all over the walls: The Paranoia of Big Brother watching you? Or just a kind of heady art? These faces do not ever laugh, they don't emit emotions, signs, or signals. Empty and rigid, they stare at you or into space, with no expression whatsoever, without the slightest trace of an attempt to interact or to communicate (the way we've learned to read such an attempt). But then, some of these faces seem to be, quite literally, beyond themselves: They speak from somewhere else, just like those figures in cartoons, from little bubbles opening up in random body parts, as if permitting sudden access, or just a glimpse of hidden, partial vulnerabilities - enlarged, distorted and, yes suddenly expressive mouths, or noses, hands or various fragments overlaying other, and indifferent, body parts. It is in these insertions, these wounds cut into healthy tissue that we detect the kind of diction of a second (inner?) life, an alien voice lent to these figures who, left to themselves, seem to have lost just that ability: A kind of mental outsourc- ing, someone else to put in charge of emotional communication, so to speak - perhaps even in charge of administering their emotional life altogether? A simple and straightforward symbol of the Zeitgeist? Of atrophied abilities to see ourselves as objects, in various perspectives, from many sides at once? To be sure, these standardized faces do remind us of contemporary icons: A certain stylized sensuality, the empty gaze, nothing at all that points to any aim or focus beyond the moment, gestures and faces lacking expression, meaning or directions, or even individuality, no hint of expectations anywhere: their world is either/or, is black and white, that's it. It stops in the immediate present. What happened to Kerstin Roolfs usual inspired use of color? At best, these portraits do allow some accidental traces, an afterthought, an echo maybe of some long lost sensibility. Kerstin Roolfs will not try to capture some essential, true identities behind, below all social rules, masks, histrionics. Like any artist she refuses to assume there is but one identity - she searches out those latencies, i.e. the simultaneous presence of all potentialities. These heads do not suggest the rigor mortis of a terminal identity, they seem to be identities "in waiting", without a substance of their own, waiting to be activated by an Other, as in a fairy tale, someone kissing them into existence, breathing life into them, a looker-on turning into a partner. More often than not these heads come in dual-packs, in multiples - even though they seem to have nothing in common, no interaction. At times, their eyes seem to intersect but not meet, in other cases they just stare in parallel directions, like aliens in an urban mass, not noticing one another. There are overlapping faces but even then it is a mere physical overlay, a competition for physical, not mental, space. This juxtaposition of alien existences, this incredible distance between bodies so close perhaps suggests a desperate search for some far focus which they have stopped expecting in their everyday environment, a groping motion toward some point of reference beyond themselves. Perhaps the mirror images are such a variant of this pursuit? Splitting oneself could be one way of finding, or constructing, such a point, an addressee out there to finally relate to. Narcissus chose this method misunderstood as crude self-love). And finally, there are those quasi-serial pictures in which fragmentary figures, also without a context, background, or environment seem to step out of themselves, so to speak - but never toward another. Kerstin Roolfs' oeuvre does not know the notion of a group- an icy wind of existential loneliness surrounds her figures. We know, and we experience almost physically: they are not really "portraits" - portraits presuppose someone on the other side, someone seeing the original from his or her perspective, a relation, an interaction of seeing and being seen. These are faces without an addressee or target, faces not facing anyone nor anything, faces ready to go, to be or to act, all resource, nothing but latencies. |
Like an ironic commentary: Kerstin Roolfs transparencies. |
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