Klaus Jörres: Kleine Bilder

About

In the practice he has built over twenty years, Jörres creates large-format acrylic paintings based on renderings and drafts exported from secondhand Mac computers, manipulating the basic visual structure of modern design, the grid.

With Kleine Bilder, Small Pictures, the artist no longer transfers his “digital drafts” to the canvas by hand, instead  generating a series of small-format 30-by-40-cm C-prints directly on photographic paper, framed and face-mounted to frosted acrylic glass. The cybernetic color palette and structured compositions develop images oscillating between techie disruption and classic abstraction. The acrylic front’s subtle milky thickness, not unlike the surface of oil paintings, further abstracts the linear language of rotations, overlays, repetitions, and cutouts.

Considering the long-suppressed but currently rapid rise of digital art, there exists a need for digital works of art in physical form. In this context, Jörres conceives of his Small Pictures as a tangible format that nonetheless responds to the basic ideas behind NFTs, for example, and the demands of a new kind of art market characterized by increased participation and a growing group of collectors.

To stand before an older or a more recent, a larger or smaller picture by Jörres (who has no use for work titles) is to find oneself incapable of letting one’s perceptions come to a rest. The plateaus of superimposed and intermeshed visual planes seem charged with an intangible dynamic energy that manifests as white noise and flickering. Moiré effects of the sort the artist has long employed have historic antecedents in the practices of Bridget Riley, François Morellet, or Carlos Cruz-Diez; working in different contexts, they created similar situations in the early 1960s that pushed the psycho-physiological capacity of eye and brain to edges where two-dimensional image and three-dimensional space blurred into one another. Nowadays, the ambient visual noise of Jörres’s pictures between abstraction and image interference may stand for the residual resistance that art is allowed, and by extension, for pure and positive potentiality.

Not unlike the specific objects that Donald Judd launched as vehicles of a “tactical innovatory art criticism” (Klaus Jörres) in the 1960s, deftly occupying a new interstice between painting and sculpture, the Small Pictures are specific objects: neither painting nor photography but hybrids without a central organizing principle. The artist sources all components from suppliers, making the works quasi-readymades: the demand assessment, the design and planning process, and the supply chain management are all handled from Jörres’s desk in a kind of telework, as is the final assembly of the material. It strikes me as significant that the works can’t be taken apart again. That makes them almost the physical equivalents of NFTs—simulacra. The Latin word—the Greek counterpart is “eidolon”—denotes sheer images detached from the surface, holographic “doppelgangers” of what they represent whose agency unfolds in the twilight zone between subject and object, between thing and beholder. Not coincidentally, the word “film” has its origins in a similar context. If we read Jörres’s Small Pictures as simulacra, they capture, within a world steeped in technology, the gruffly poetic quality of a new interstice bridging design and product.