Shadows Images Tears

Ludwig Wittgenstein starts his first work Tractatus logico philosophicus with this sentence: “The world is everything that is the case.” It is followed by a chain of austere statements, such as “The world is the totality of facts, not of things.” Is – is – is... The world of the logical is a world of the timeless present. But from the chasm between the past and future, between what is past in the future and the present experience of an irrecoverable bygone-ness, springs the energy, the tension of what is human.

Shadows Images Tears (Schatten Bilder Risse) is the title of a double exhibition of painter Stefan Kees and photographer Bernhard Strauss, curated by Peter Kohlhaas (Galerie1214). The guiding principle is a balance “on the knife’s edge” of a dialogue: between the image and its disappearance, memory and its dissipation; between what is documentary and what has occurred by chance. A wordless meditation on the conversation between the assertion – or self-assertion – “This is how it is” or “This is me” and the unalterable passage of time.

Do photographs show “what is the case”? Do portraits show people, the face of humanity? Or do they show how people are viewed through this technical medium? Do photos show memories? Or do they show how someone wanted to be recalled when – in the pre-selfie era – that person’s picture was taken by a photographer?

What do images of cities say about people? What and who speaks from the relics of a life, and how does existence show itself? Stefan Kees and Bernhard Strauss discover clues in surfaces and in what has been left behind, each working with the media of his own specific artistic idea. Photographs grasp eagerly for meaning, rearranging objects and placing life and what has already passed on (remnants) side by side. Meaning is packed and laid bare, and secret messages are exchanged without revealing their content, leaving interpretation open. Works that were created independently of each other feel their way into space, together.

Stefan Kees (*1968), lives in South Germany, as a surgeon and painter with own studio. Since 2003 numerous solo and group exhibitions (Kunstverein Bayreuth, Staedt. Galerie Tuttlingen, Kunstforum Hochschwarzwald, Stadtmuseum für Kunst und Geschichte Hüfingen).

Bernhard Strauss (*1966), lives in Freiburg (Breisgau), as international known photographer for art and architecture. Studies with John Sexton (USA, 1991), lecturer at hKDM Freiburg (2011-16), contributed in numerous art projects and catalogues, runs a display storeroom in Freiburg; last expositions in Bad Duerrheim and Berlin with Galerie1214.

All photographs of the gallery views: courtesy of Bernhard Strauss 2018