Drawings of the Non-Visual

Extract from the exhibition catalogue “Beyond There Is What Lies Within”, April 2014, by Jochen Proehl

Drawings of the invisible

“the bird knows – they have forgotten” or “being transformed” are the titles of artworks by the Berlin based artist Rebecca Raue. The compositions are assembled out of planes of colour and graphic elements, which seem to be applied with great ease, almost casual, and which give these works the suggestion of notes out of another reality. The colours and shapes consequently don’t describe and space, object, figure are at most citations out of the visual world experiences of the viewer.

With the exhibition “Beyond there is what lies within”, hosted in the BAUART Gallery in Istanbul, Rebecca Raue shows her newest works in a city which not only accommodates evidence of Ottoman art in its heyday in great density, but where Byzantine mosaics of the Chora Museum are to be seen, which are counted amongst the most significant pieces of this specific art form.

With their reverse perspective, the compression of the incidences on the surface, with proportions derived from the meaning of shapes, with the non-space which also implies movement, and the reference of an out-of-this-world reality, these works belong also to the kind of art, which Pavel Florenskij took, amongst others, as the starting point of his evidence against modernity with its central perspective representation. For Florenskij, the division of object and viewer, as the central perspective sets out to do, is unthinkable, because the connections of all events in the world are not separable from each other. Such undividable unity of object and subject rears up also in the works of Rebecca Raue. Even further, the themes appear to almost project themselves onto the image area.

The artist is nevertheless set in a totally different tradition. With all formal leanings towards important painting positions in the 20 century, which Rebeca Raue updates with her work, it is especially their quality as drawings in which the invisible dimensions of thought and feeling meet the visible: As the captions already indicate – to be, to feel, to think and not-to-be – find in these works a visual level which would not be accessible in the everyday perception of the viewer.