A “space of porosity and experimentation,” a “threshold”… photography constitutes for the German artist Katinka Bock – whose “Forms of the Unexpected” we discovered at Lafayette Anticipations three years ago – the “periphery” of her sculptural field. 

In fact, the photographs gathered here bear witness to her “sculptural” gaze on objects, spaces, nature, and bodies. One also finds there, through the instantaneity of the views, the part left to chance and randomness. This randomness to which she delivers her attempts at sculptures (or “involuntary sculptures”) when she buries an object wrapped in fresh clay to let it burn and collect the “residual object” and its imprint … Or, when she pours bronze on cactus, burning in contact with the molten metal, generating random asperities on the surface of sculptures.

FRAGMENTS OF BODIES

Minimalist, like her sculptures approaching abstraction without ever quite melting into it, always evoking organic forms, pieces of skin or bodies…, her close-ups turn epidermis into living paintings. The skin is, moreover, in these photographs, the place of meeting of the man with the animal and the vegetable: a dying hornet bending over the edge of a hand, a grasshopper climbing up a shoulder, a silver snake wrapped around a wounded finger, the limb of a dead cactus hanging from another… here is the infinitesimal and the tiny transformed into an epic, the most imperceptible things become perceptible, the insignificance sublimated… Placed in the foreground, two palms stained with earth testify forcefully to this poetry of the fragment and the nothing. 

EMPREINTES

For the fragments of bodies are often the places of appearance of an image: here, the print of the folds of a pillow on a teenage cheek, there, that of a bundle of grass on the top of a leg … Moments of life taking shape, becoming forms, torn from time; fleeting moments become eternal …

The title given to this series devoted to “the trace” and “the skin as a surface of inscription,” For your eyes only, reveals the importance of the physical relationship to the work, the importance of the body and touch in the work of Katinka Bock. “I am attentive to the way in which bodies, materials, surfaces speak to us in their silence,” the artist explains, citing a recently discovered video work by Alighiero Boetti, Ciò che sempre parla in silenzio è il corpo [What always speaks in silence is the body] (from 1974): “For me, photography has to do with this silence of bodies.” 

STÉPHANIE DULOUT

KATINKA BOCK – DER SONNENSTICH

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