Régine Kolle
With regard to the painting of Regine Kolle
Like suspended fragments, marks seeking to be inscribed, signs waiting to be completed: fragile exercises like those painted by Regine Kolle. Is the image which appears blurred, uncertain? Is painting, which does not pretend to be anything but its proper presence of dashes, lines, and layers of color-otherwise said, which affirms itself by a play of compositions, forms, without worrying about sticking to the real or to a model?
At the first vision of one of these paintings, the gaze seeks to pierce the apparent disorder, or to reconstitute an image which is refused to it. Sometimes it perceives a common scene, the title indicates a place, a territory, a space whose sudden emergence would have difficulty in clearing a way towards an accumulation of signs. The painting is there, instant, between composition and decomposition, affirmation and hesitation. We know that to believe in the possible achievement of a painting is a perilous thing. It is never but fragment of a tought, or a gesture. Regine Kolle assumes this fragmentation. In the manner of a world within which we do not cease to become tangled in the most dissimilar of impressions and bursts of sensations, how are the contours of a painting, which is its echo, to be expressed?
Cross Over, 1996
Oil on canvas
50.5 cm x 56 cm
Far from wanting a pure pictorial work closed upon itself, which translates the pretense of the completion of the painting, in making use most often of recognizable images, inserts itself in the network of perpetual movement, oscillating between realism and evocation. The source of images is not the result of a direct experience: it is created by the bias of reproductions, coming from the most diverse of fields: sports, cinema, comic strips, industrial or natural objects, childhood memories, well-worn clichés of daily life...
Q.B.C., 1996
Oil on canvas
95.5 cm * 107 cm
These assorted subjects cohabitate in paintings, which are for the most part of small formats, in order to better invite the gaze. Here the eye of a predator occupies the whole space, there an army of Kurateka mark the rhythm of the surface of a quasi-geometric motif, while a colored palette, almost sparkling, evokes the undertones of a post card. This collision of banal instants, as much witness to an explosion of the world of images as it is to the faculty of painting to be able to mark out this collapse, is of a strange modernity. The vibrant colors, the rigor of the marks, the brutality of the gestures affirm the jerky successions, the chaotic events of the world. The gaze recognizes, but floats in the indecision of what there really is to perceive. The image offers itself as a door to comprehension, but the senses stop at the threshold of an uneasiness which renders us daef to painting.
Confronting the crisis of representation says more for the capacity of painting, when it is neither complacement nor clever, when on the contrary, it intends to resolutely challenge contempory stakes, to subvert. If art is that which holds out against communication, then the work of Regine Kolle represents art well.
Paul Hervé PARSY
Translated by Tamara Watson
Regine Kolle was born in 1967in Cologne, Germany. She has been living and working in Paris since 1994.
| 1996 | sept-déc | artiste en résidence, Quartier Éphémère, Montréal | |
| 1993 | D.N.S.E.P. (Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique) | ||
| 1988-1993 |  |
École des Beaux-Arts, Nîmes, Gard, France | |
| 1986-1988 | Université de Cologne, Allemagne |
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| Exhibitions | |||
| 1997 | mai: février: |
Hôpital Éphémère, Paris “Up to Space, Down to Earth”, Quartier Éphémère, Montréal |
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| 1996 | mai: | Galerie Samia Saouma, Paris |
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