Inbetween Distance and Connection

The Painting

In 2020, right before the pandemic hit, I got involved in a group exhibition project. The exhibition theme was still to be determined but with the emerging pandemic an inescapable topic presented itself. Inbetween Distance and Connection.

Simultaneously, during these unfamiliar weeks of the first German lockdown, my partner Mathias had started composing a musical opus – to channel his own ambivalent emotions of this internationally shared experience into a creative project. When we talked about our respective projects and discovered that we were essentially both working on individual artworks under the same theme, we decided to team up. So while Mathias was still creating and recording the instrumental, I further developed the conceptual side of our project and recorded the spoken narration for the musical piece. Rico Latzel was the first sounding board for Mathias' initial plot outline and also contributed most of the bass lines.

But this was only one piece of our envisioned artwork. We wanted to present a multidisciplinary piece at the exhibition. An audiovisual narration. An artwork with both auditory as well as visual elements. Sound and sight responding to each other, leading to a multisensory exchange which synergetically creates a new entity altogether. With the story in mind, narrated in seven chapters, I set out to plan the visual side of our multi-media artwork in my sketchbook. A large scale mixed-media painting that captured the energy of each chapter's music and storyline in colour and shapes.

As soon as the composition process was finished and Mathias had provided me with the first rough mix, I set about the painting process on the 320x220 cm sized canvas. What fascinated me, was the question how a sequence of incidents could be portrayed in a single piece of visual art. How a painting, that can be viewed with one glance, may also tell the story of a series of events. 

Below you can read more about how I answered this question for myself and also get a more detailed insight into the individual steps of the painting creation.