THE BEAUTY OF INTIMACY.

With its 200 pieces by 59 artists from 18 different countries

The Beauty of Intimacy – Lens and Paper offers an international cross section of contemporary artistic production. As the heading suggests, only works have been chosen that could be summed up by the keywords lens and paper. Works on paper and such as were made with the help of a lens, i.e. photographs, videos and films. The focal point of most of the exhibits is the human figure and the images it generates that are being analysed over and over in portraits as well in scenic sketches. The show, while not committing itself as such, might be taken as a portrait of our time as all the works it comprises have been created over the last twenty years, most of them after 1990, even.

Though rarely the explicit subject of the artworks, time, on a certain level, is ever present, in the shapes of a contemporariness or historical positioning, as well as a time of production or a conception of time inherent in the pictures. If we look at the exhibition 

The Beauty of Intimacy – Lens and Paper in this light a panorama opens up to us of configurations of time overlapping, contradicting, but also supplying each other with hints at possible interpretations. Each work, be it static image or dynamic sequence of pictures, is pervaded by time. In the organisation and re-organisation of the controlled shifting of forms time stands as a creative condition between subject (artist) and object (artwork). Our linear conception of time finds a direct correspondence in the drawings where the dynamical movement of a pen through space and time manifests itself on paper. The seeming directness of the photos, on the other hand, their ‚realism’, all too easily makes us forget about how dependent on time especially this medium after all is. For it is not alone exposure time that has a decisive share in the outcome. Indeed, traditional, i.e. not digitally manipulated, photography is the medium of the moment per se, the visible proof of the temporary presence of a motif. In few cases only the works assembled are about the right moment, the snapshot. Photo art, as it is presented here, aims at the organisation of the visual with the help of the staging of a vision. Whether, by doing so, extant picture material is being re-photographed (Richard Prince), somebody is giving directions from behind the camera (Alicia Framis, Sharon Lockhart), or the picture is being worked over afterwards (Mariko Mori, Pipilotti Rist), that seems to be of no more than secondary importance. What counts is the opportunity to design a picture, conjure up realities, to set down visual hypotheses and to feed them into real time without letting them become absorbed.  

The Beauty of Intimacy
assembles artworks that constitute an alternative plan to the object- or action-related pictures the observer is being flooded with through advertising and the entertainment industry. Man here does not appear as a social being or a subject communicating. What we encounter are single, isolated figures (Lothar Hempel, Hellen van Meene), metamorphoses of what is human (Angus Fairhurst, Fabrice Hybert), habitations of emptiness (Rachel Whiteread). Wherever there are narrative moments taken up, or contexts being offered at all, these are contradictory or at least ambiguous. It is precisely in this semantic vagueness though, which has to be understood as the result of careful construction, where the virulence and the topicality of the pieces on show lie hidden. They balk at a straightforward readability by cutting down all temporary and spatial points of reference to a minimum and thus consciously keeping up a distance between the observer and the self-contained entity of the picture subject. The irritation caused, the impression of being the invisible observer of an intimate scene, which promises no satisfaction whatsoever though to the voyeuristic gaze, this is part of the strategy. Confronted with these pictures the contemporary, focussed on the maximization of productive efficiency as he is, becomes aware of his acquired critical categories failing him. What remains hidden behind the protective, second skin, the image hinted at through stance, clothing, haircut and styling of those portrayed, is left open. The quest for a meaning of the individual striving for self-definition is not what this is about. The portrayed are witnesses for the very reason of their puppet-like passivity. Withdrawn into themselves or waiting for (albeit uncertain) outer events they appear removed from the course of time. This detachment is one aspect of the 

Beauty of Intimacy 
as it seemingly lends duration to the moment and thus echoes, on the level of content, what the artists have made to come true on paper and by means of a camera.

Idea and production: Carel Balth