Recollections of the Future

by Clemens Klöckner

Katrin Kampmann’s most recent paintings, water colours and photographs unfurl a wide, associative field before the beholder. Was the future—as formerly suggested by Karl Valentin—indeed once better in the past? More romantic?Something more worth striving for? Was it even perhaps, paradoxically, closerto us then than it is today? Have the now tangible developments in technology impeded, or even ruled out, access to utopian visions? And are we ever toregain them? ‘Time-Travel Made Easy’, certainly, calls to mind the promised aid of a manual (or one of the omnipresent Web 2.0 tutorials) while yet countering potential expectations toward attaining any answers or applicable solutions. Indeed, the artist, while providing the beholder with a metaphysically, fully functional time-space vehicle, refrains from including any work-intrinsic navigational system. Where the journey might end is left up to the beholder, who—having been called upon to embark equipped with the sole aid of subjective experience—is to become entirely immersed in the images.

 Katrin Kampmann’s pictorial worlds are characterised by a shimmering range of colourfulness cast over the canvas and paper like a rampantly sprawling, pulsating mesh, from which, by degrees, figurative elements emerge.  Surprisingly, one is quickly confronted by something amongst her latest works which would appear to be antithetical:  monochrome photographs. Captured with a simple pinhole camera, the coarse-grained black and white photos recall, if only upon first glance, the traditional practice of making studies for painterly works using the camera obscura. Yet, Kampmann employs the medium here with greater methodology than in previous endeavours in order to record scenarios she deems to be pictorially relevant but nonetheless unsuited as motifs for painterly realisation. Notwithstanding, the photographic result, with its pictorialist coarseness and obscure pictural boundaries, leaves an impression that is by all means painterly. Moreover, a certain motivic peculiarity is, to be sure, of great importance to the effectuality of the photographic images: the scenes depicted have all been thoroughly pre-composed, in that each of them constitutes a photographic adaptation of found footage, appropriated from pre-existing science-fiction films.

Of particular interest to the artist is the pictorial vocabulary that, between the birth of film and the second half of the twentieth century, developed over the course of countless portrayals depicting futuristic space-travel visions, technical advances and the discovery of distant worlds. Far removed from computer generated-effect-orgies, she traces stories and various images of humanity which, viewed before the backdrop of the big unknown, exhibit an even, at times, literally fairytale-like freedom in relishing unbound narrative license. Interior or exterior views of fantastic rockets and extraterrestrial spacecraft along with figures positioned before blinking control panels and steering-modules dominate the images, the temporal allocation of which, owing to the omission of colour, has become nearly impossible. More telling, however, are—provided one is unable to recognise the specific films referenced—the stage sets themselves, which transport the avantgardistic design elements integral to the various points of production into an imagined future. From the varied forms of space capsules to interiors comprised of screen displays, indicators of all sorts and designer furniture, right through to the fashion-conscious conceptions of the space suits, a specific notion of the future becomes apparent, thus revealing still more about the past present of the protagonists. With the motif, for instance, of a cat lairing upon a chest of drawers beside a decorative bouquet in a comely vase, only the gaze through a  window in the background signifies that the scene portrayed has been set in outer space.

‘[...] One must never forget that it was film which invented the aesthetic formulae of manned space travel. Science merely provided the machines.’  It is by means of photography that Katrin Kampmann approaches these aesthetic formulae, established as such by the film historian Andreas Kilb with respect to Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929). This juncture, however, is merely the point at which the artistic process actually begins. The layers below the surface having now been exposed, the filmic narratives are yet further construed to engender more of that which they intrinsically are: projection screens for ideas, for the conceptions and yearnings of the beholder, finally liberated from the gravitational pull of earthly reality and the everyday. Though it may well be possible to attribute meaning to Kampmann’s auratic portraits by retracing them, initially derived as they are from characters in films, back to original images, doing so is neither necessary nor would be relevant to the artist’s intentions. Indeed, the water colours and large-format paintings presented here are less to be understood as pictures of anything than as substitutes for something residing outside of them. As do the ink blots of a Rorschach test, the colours acquire a life of their own, which is, in turn, influenced by the individual interpretations of the beholder. A battle scene set before the backdrop of a lunar mountain range can evolve into a dance, a corporeal coalescence, or a kiss. The facial and bodily contours of a man reposing in an Eames Lounge Chair dissipate altogether—an intended dematerialisation, a blurry recollection or an indication, finally, of a non-human life form? Amidst all the charged pointedness of their content, Katrin Kampmann’s images are primarily concerned with exploring the possibilities offered by the medium of painting and presenting the beholder with an invitation to surrender themselves unto its spheres of influence.

English translation by Nathan Moore

[1] Andreas Kilb: Aus der romantischen Frühzeit der Raketen, in: FAZ Feuilleton, 07.02.2010 (http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kino/momente-des-deutschen-films-i-aus-der-romantischen-fruehzeit-der-raketen-1941375.html, Stand 15.11.2013).