‘Waldinterieurs’ (‘Forest Interiors’) is the name Astrid Korntheuer has given to her series of black-&-white photographs showing pure forest. Forest that everyone is actually familiar with, forest that is inviting with its romantic views of clearings, its shielding leafy canopy and meaningful rustling of the tops of the fir trees. It promises regeneration and rejuvenation.
This almost universally accepted and symbolic truth is strengthened further by the medium of black-&-white photography. Astrid Korntheuer has shown in her other series how well she as an artist can make use of color in a photograph. She knows how to use color in her compositions, even to the degree we see in William Eggleston’s works: If you took away the color, the composition would not survive. So why the ‘Waldinterieurs’ in black and white? Why not in an array of enchanting colors?
In ‘Cerro Castillo 1’, we would like nothing more than to dive into the sea of light and shadows and soft mosses and ferns. How so do we long to abandon ourselves to the poetry of the playful light and shadow – if only it were not for the altogether unsafe forest floor on which we seek a passable path in vain? The picture 'Indiwald 3' has something promising about it, like the light at the end of a tunnel. Yet our way there is blocked by the mesh of branches. The leaves in 'Rosenhöhe 6' form layers up towards the sky like the levels of a mountain slope, without us being able to take even one step on them in that direction.
The distance that speaks from Astrid Korntheuer’s very close up pictures is all the more apparent through the medium of black and white photography. Through the latter’s degree of abstraction, this distance becomes a reference to the metaphors bound up with the forest, as they were suggested in the beginning.
However, for the observer this idyll turns into gloom. In many pictures not only can we hardly make out the ground it is safe to stand on, but the twigs and branches become impervious curtains. Where we expect an idyll, there is no getting through. Indeed, the otherwise really very ‘nice’ nature, as we repeatedly believe, becomes an impassable wall which repels you all the more, the more you engage in Astrid Korntheuer’s game of light and shadow, the promising light and the depressions that her inkjet printer so impressively reproduce. She uses white, gray and black tones as well as contrast in her photographs as in an orchestral composition; to form an overall impression which aims for the universal and with which she is all the more accurate in hitting our fine sensitivity for this sphere. It equals the expulsion from Heaven.
Thomas Poller, april 2006
|
<< ZURÜCK
|