As always, we were interested in the question of origin, and this feeling of complete blindness — whether from understanding or misunderstanding — felt very intense to us. A contemporaneous 2023 painting statement gives the broader working principle. It is placed here as context, not as a statement written specifically about the six January paintings:
We work with images. We find objects and can reproduce them freely. Like images of Mary and Jesus. A coffee cup on an empty ground, a hanging tube, a glass, one fid, another fid. Drawing them again and again. Returning to the work is described there as recollection — a renewed actualisation of its idea. Each thing retains an equal relation to the idea. This is not serial production.
This is a form for thinking. Simply to begin thinking. Installation view, I WANDER ALL NIGHT — Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, 25–28 April 2024. Installation view, I WANDER ALL NIGHT — Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, 25–28 April 2024. The six paintings were shown together as a compact 3 × 2 field. Their differences unfold inside a deliberately reduced situation: the same small vertical format, a pale painted field, exposed edges, residual colour and marks that prevent the surface from becoming completely closed.
A later authorial formulation names this condition Not-yet-image: an image has begun to assemble but is stopped before it stabilises as a fixed sign or object.
This operation remains even when the geometric form disappears. In later painting the plane can be opened not by a cube, tube or cone but by fog, indeterminacy, a state in which the image seems about to appear but has not yet appeared. The means change, but the same problem remains: how to hold form at the moment of emergence, preventing it from finally closing into a sign or a stable image. Noise Index, White Mold, spatial forms and the later “fog” can therefore be understood not as separate stylistic periods but as a sequence of different instruments in the same work of opening form.
Painting Origins, 2023 — the six paintings, reverse, surface details and side views. These paintings remain close to Icons and continue alongside the same painting field, without being members of the Icons Series.
