Message of Material
Painting and Media in the Work of Jochen Piepmeyer
Isn't it so that Fine Arts and the technical image are influencing each other? Isn't it so that principles, compositions, forms and contents of the so called "classical arts" build important foundations for the aesthetic of the technical images?
To point out this relations is fundamental in the art of Piepmeyer. While technical media are related both to scientific and medical purposes and as well to attraction and entertainment the artist tries to go with this symbiosis along with painting. In his collages and paintings one can find a more unspectacular and calmer aspect which combines different influences, sources and techniques in a synaesthetic way, before or already beyond of speed and acceleration. He is focusing and reducing on still images and allows the viewer to see that there are no solutions but ques-tions. His work unties borders and opens fields of associations.
In the four exhibited works, "The Wind Cries Mary", "Unpainted Painting No.1", "Rain Over Germany" and "The City" (all part of a production period winter/spring 95) he is using more and more found material. X-ray-photographs, postcards, holiday-pictures, computertomograph-scans in combination with disturbing material from them junk, like broken acrylic-glass, artificial turf, carpets etc.. The gesture of painting is reduced to very subtle interven-tions, sometimes not even that. The representation of the material evokes questions about the surrounding, where one lives in, the ground, where one stands and the things, where one is looking on.
When the artist intervenes, he puts his finger on the wound, not as a brutal act but as an invitation to rethink about the apparent conditions of the visible everyday surrounding. He uses the ready-made material and adds his brush, his mind and his intuition. The result is not just the sum; the sense within the work is part of the arrangement of the elements. But the riddle isn´t solved neither for him nor for viever.
"Art works are only exciting, when the artist is surprised while he works. If a painting is just correct, the painter was wrong. Art needs irritation for the artist and probably even more for the spectator." (JP)
Both, in his technical and intentional qualities one can see the artist's leitmotiv: the equality of things, the simultaneity of the unsimultaneous-ness, to be in front of something and at the same time behind, the meditation together with the individual valuation of "what is visible" and the revaluation by association.
Important ingredients in his work are colour, composition, format and ductus. He uses them as a vocabulary of non-narrative description of everyday reality. The bearer of the image follows the theme of the colour. He is cutting, pasting, adding new material to the canvas and expands the content. The composition becomes the theme. He plays with the necessity of a legitimacy, that the viewer develops according to habits of perception and patterns of expectation, while at the same time he disturbs it in a way that provokes irritations.
"Often I can only understand my paintings, when I have finished them long time ago." (JP)
His working process goes through a rough series of sketches that are checked, neglected, assorted and remodelled, till he reaches an autonomous form. Piepmeyer´s work is a kind of mo-dern archaeological track tracing, that follows a line for a while and is adding arguments, but it also loosing the path in different layers, erasing itself, stays as a Trojan horse and forces the viewer to find its way through an reservoir of rudiments, phases and fragments.
"My work is about polarity, about entity of the difference in nature and the nature of man." (JP)
By taking material from the world around us he attempts to recombine the things to a new picture about it. He adds his notation by using the brush and the paint. So he is referring to the simultaneity of appearance, the coming and the passing, the web of things and in the end to the spirit behind the material.
(Heiko Daxl, June 1995)