and the chimeras of the Cité des Arts
My visit to Jürgen Buhre's studio in Paris began with a big surprise. I had assumed more recent work, mainly to be found on canvas.
What I saw instead were entirely new picture creations. Strange creatures appeared on rather smaller plates who blew the predetermined area in their tendency and projected into the room:
Image reliefs - relief images with unusual materiality and yet unmistakable provided with the imagery of the artist Buhre. I knew Buhre's sculptural work and its close relationship to his painting. Here, however, suddenly appeared a symbiotic fusion of different media. The use of materialities of substances by him, some knotted, sewn on or glued to, that form the actual subject of the work, have puzzled and fascinated me. They were "intermediate beings", their materiality not negating but also removed from, through the scenic implementation. Windings of the material put the seam as a hem, as sample or as scar; do they symbolize a wound or scar or do they add two things into one as a connecting line?
Materiality and tangibility of works of art significantly belong to the basics and conditions of aesthetic experience. This tangibility is inseparable from the appearance of the artwork. Only through artistic design, acts of interpretation and judgment, additions, things can evolve to aesthetic experiential work. This process of transformation from thing to work of art is neither irreversible nor independent of historical, cultural and institutional contexts. The relationship between art and thing, as with with Jürgen Buhres "chimeras", reveals itself as a story of varying boundaries and delimitation. Jürgen Buhre has discovered the delimitation of the artwork by the incorporation of daily use items and consumer goods, an achievement of the avant-garde, originated and homed mainly in Paris. Paris for him became a place of the reflected pausing, of holding distance and of development of his previous artistic practice. He thus addresses the fundamental question in art, namely the basic assumption that a picture is always an image of something, a representation of a matter with which it itself does not concur. This difference between the picture as the object of its own materiality and what the picture presents, is held in limbo by Jürgen in picture objects - object pictures.
Michael Kortländer