Carolin Israel – Toolkit Begleitpublikation zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung in der der Neuen Sächsischen Galerie vom 6. Juni bis 3. September 2023
Texte: Michael Klipphahn-Karge, Svetlana Chernyshova, Luca Rey
Neue Sächsische Galerie Chemnitz, 2023
Verlag: Neue Chemnitzer Kunsthütte e. V.
ISBN: 978-3-937176-44-4
[DE]
Carolin Israel setzt der Malerei in ihrer Arbeit mit Farbe, Faktur und Duktus kaum mediale Grenzen: Aspekte des Bildlichen wie Stofflichkeit zu Form und Prozess zu Resultat kippen nicht nur in ihrer Malerei ineinander, sondern in den Realraum. Dadurch werden Raum und Malerei gleichermaßen hybrid: Hinter- und Vordergrund, Flächen, Schichtungen und Leerräume, Öffnungen und Schließung bestimmen sich gegenseitig, fast wie in den klassischen Anlagen eines Bildes oder der Anordnung von Objekten in einem Raum. Israels Farbspektrum ist dabei ähnlich furchtlos; von Freimütigkeit und Leichtigkeit gekennzeichnet wirken ihre Farbflächen ebenso zufällig wie konstruiert, gesetzt wie improvisiert.
Text von Michael Klipphahn-Karge (Ausschnitt aus: Den Raum zurechtweisen. Carolin Israels expansive Malerei)
[EN]
In her work with colour, composition and ductus, Carolin Israel hardly sets any media boundaries for painting: Aspects of the pictorial such as substance becoming form and process leading to outcome not only tip into each other in her painting, but into real space. This makes space and painting equally hybrid: background and foreground, surfaces, layering and empty spaces, openings and closures mutually determine each other, very similar to the classical layout of a painting or the arrangement of objects in a space.
text: Michael Klipphahn-Karge [extract from Rectifying the Space. Carolin Israel's expansive painting, translation: Einde O'Callaghan]
photo Jennifer Rumbach | kunstbar
[EN]
Between Unambiguity and Open-endedness: On the Reality of Carolin Israel's Paintings
Carolin Israel's paintings create a kind of stage for their intimate theatrical world. Large areas of colour push themselves forwards from the painting's ground in layers, each one occupying its own space yet communicating with the others. Sometimes tonally cold and sometimes warm, compacted and closed-in or transparent in form, they reflect different perceptions of reality, realms of feeling, states of being. Although they are layered and therefore in series, these surface areas are interlocked and intertangled and form an amalgam that cannot be pulled apart, blasting forth a great, harmonious chord of colour. This is always in a major key rather than a minor one, and radiant. There always remains – in one form or another – a small, and occasionally larger, window onto the infinity of the pictorial ground from which everything originates.
The tonal base chord of these paintings remains abstract. Growing out of the interaction of colours or colour fields, this dynamic exchange of differences is a mirror of our pluralistic societal fabric. As such it sets the scene for further lively interactions between fragmented constellations of colour and form that often reach right from the picture's surface through the sound-spaces of the large colour fields back to the pictorial ground. This is a dramatic narrative whose subject is drawn from tangible and intangible reality, the real and the virtual, thus on the one hand from the artist's personal experience and private life and on the other from multimedia spaces and their possibilities. Even the titles of the paintings that she chooses encourage this hypothesis. And with them, in fact, Carolin Israel leaves the realm of pure abstraction. Her fragmented constellations of colour form themselves into pictorial content through a kind of latent image effect in the colours, a both-one-thing-and-the-other in the definition of their intrinsic values, and at the same time they serve to function as a suggestively atmospheric description of reality. In this painterly mode the artist locates herself at the end of a long trajectory that spans many illustrious names, from late Velazquez via the coloured fogs of Turner and the colouristic harmonies of Adolf Hoelzel to the Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning. In parallel to this complex of multiple meanings and multiple functions of colour achieved through the latent image effect, Carolin Israel also seeds her compositions with fragments of things that have remained recognisably real. In their direct, haptic unambiguity they represent a polar opposite to the far more ambiguous material worlds in the interplay of colours with their atmospheric open-endedness.
There are then two realities placed one against the other: a world that can be directly experienced and that is tangible and, alongside this world, one that is far more ambiguous and on a much more abstract plane. In its sustained overall precision, it is this very world that retains an open-endedness that invites speculative fantasy. Concrete pictorial associations are left up to the viewer. He can have three guesses.
text by Rainer Beck / translated by Richard Aronowitz
[DE]
Zwischen Eindeutigkeit und Offenheit: Zur Wirklichkeit von Carolin Israels Bildern
Carolin Israels Bilder bilden eine Art Bühne für ihr kleines Welttheater. Schichtenweise schieben sich große Farbflächen vom Bildgrund nach vorne, eine jede für sich raumhaltig und gleichzeitig mit den anderen kommunizierend. Manchmal von kalter, manchmal von warmer Tonalität, von kompakt-geschlossener oder transparenter Körperlichkeit, markieren sie unterschiedliche Wirklichkeitsempfindungen, Gefühlsräume, Seinszustände. Obwohl geschichtet und damit in Reihenfolge, sind diese Flächenräume ineinander verzahnt, miteinander verstrickt, bilden ein nicht auseinanderzudividierendes Amalgam, das in einen großen gemeinsamen Farbakkord mündet. Dieser immer in Dur, nie in Moll, strahlend. Und immer bleibt – in irgendeiner Weise – ein kleiner, selten auch größerer Durchblick auf die Unendlichkeit des Bildgrundes, aus dem alles entsprang.
Der farbliche Grundakkord der Bilder bleibt abstrakt. Entstanden aus der Interaktion von Farben bzw. Farbflächen zu einem dynamischen Miteinander in Unterschiedlichkeit ist er ein Widerspiegel unserer pluralistisch gesellschaftlichen Verfasstheit. Als solcher bildet er die Kulisse für weitere, lebhafte Interaktionen kleinteiliger Farb- und Formkonstellationen, die nicht selten vom Bildvordergrund hindurch durch die Klangräume der großformatigen Farbflächen bis hin zum Bildgrund reichen. Es ist dies ein szenisches Geschehen, das seine Inhalte aus den greifbaren und ungreifbaren, den praktischen und virtuellen Realitäten, also persönlichem Erleben und Privatleben einerseits und den medialen Räumen und deren Möglichkeiten andererseits zieht. Schon die gewählten Bildtitel legen diese Vermutung nahe. Und tatsächlich verlässt Carolin Israel hier den Bereich der reinen Abstraktion. Ihre kleinteiligen Farbkonstellationen formen sich zu Bildinhalten, erzielt durch eine Art Kippeffekt der Farben, einem Sowohl-Als-Auch ihrer Eigenwertdemonstration und gleichzeitig dienenden Funktion zu einer andeutend atmosphärischen Gegenstandsbeschreibung. Mit dieser Darstellungsmethode befindet sich die Künstlerin am Ende einer langen Entwicklung, die, getragen von illustren Namen, vom späten Velazquez über die Farbnebel Turners und Farbharmonien Adolf Hölzels bis hin zum abstrakten Expressionismus eines Willem de Kooning reicht. Parallel zu dieser im Kippeffekt enthaltenen Komplexität einer Mehrfachbedeutung und Mehrfachfunktion der Farben streut Carolin Israel in ihre Kompositionen zusätzlich noch realistisch gehaltene Gegenstandsfragmente ein. In ihrer unmittelbar haptischen Eindeutigkeit bilden sie einen Gegenpol zu den in ihrer atmosphärischen Offenheit weitaus weniger eindeutigen Gegenstandswelten der farblichen Interaktionen.
So stehen sich am Ende zwei Wirklichkeiten gegenüber: Eine Welt unmittelbarer Erfahr- und Greifbarkeit, daneben eine weitaus weniger eindeutige, auf weitaus abstrakterem Niveau definierte. In ihrer allgemein gehaltenen Präzision bewahrt diese ausdrücklich eine zu spekulativer Phantasie einladende Offenheit. Konkret inhaltliche Assoziationen bleiben dem Betrachter überlassen. Dreimal darf er raten.
Text von Rainer Beck
Paravent | Plan D, Düsseldorf | Eric Keller and Carolin Israel
It may seem strange to use sculpture as a way of linking two painters’ work, but zoom into the layers — perhaps even ‘screens’ or ‘paravent’ — of a painting, and microscopic carved volumes in the thick layers of the surface emerge. A painting, after all, is just a sculpture compressed to the millimetres of a picture’s surface; only our eyes are not equipped to see them.
In the work of Eric Keller the layering, or successive screens, of paint simultaneously create a great depth while also compressing it into something akin to claustrophobia. Conversely, Carolin Israel’s installations explode the illusion of painterly depth into an actual spatial experience. Subsequently the spatial paintings utilise screens and drapes to merge and explore fictional and actual depth. In this way, both painters explode the confines of the canvas and continually osculate from three-dimensions to two-dimensions. Just like our everyday lives that switch continually from the pervasive flatness of the IPhone screen, to the often-disappointing three-dimensionality of the outside world. Perhaps, the flatness of the digital world is more three-dimensional than its pale counterpart in the ‘real’ world.
While the work of these two artists appears different, the observant viewer, after time, will start to see a symbiosis of echoing shapes, layers and bleached-out afterimages that merge into each other.
[…]
Carolin Israel
Paravent (2018) by Eric Keller, as the name suggests, contains a folding screen (screens, whether depicted or not, are ever present in painting). Such a screen is often used to create privacy — to conceal the naked body — as one gets dressed, something the voyeuristic sensibilities of painting always invade. The screen also manipulates and carves up whatever space it is placed in, forcibly splitting rooms and creating friction between public (the seen) and private (the unseen) space. Israel uses these dynamics to fragment the surface of the canvas into an immersive spatial experience.
The sequence of work has been influenced by the artist’s travels, and movement is key to their optical activation. Unlike Keller’s paintings, where depth changes dependent upon the treatment of the canvas’ surface, Israel’s spatial configurations change nomadically as the viewer walks around the gallery space and the various layers, screens and shadows move in relation to each other: a burlesque of concealing and revealing different aspects of the work — in the same manner as the paravent. Thus mimicking the process of continual discovery while traveling and exploring a new changing landscape.
Similar to the paintings of Howard Hodgkin the depicted scenes are on the border between abstraction and figuration and, paired with the highly saturated colours, are a concentration of reality, a shorthand of sensation. The use of colour is also on another boundary, between the natural and unnatural. It’s hard to the capture reality in painting or any art, but it probably occurs at the mid-point between these two, between factual and fictional representations, between the artificial and genuine. And in constantly straddling this boundary, Israel moves towards a faithful description of her surroundings.
Vladimir Nabokov’s writing is all too conscious of the construct that ‘reality’ is, in both writing and in life. In his novel ‘Ada’, in a typically self-reflective move, he delineates what realism in art actually is, and in the process, I think, outlines the conceptual allure of Israel’s work. His young hero Van visits the shop of Mrs. Tapirov, who makes copies of objects that people bring her: an emporium then, like Israel’s work, of simulations of reflections. As Van waits to collect his goods, he idly strokes the flowers sitting in a vase on the counter — imitation ones, of course, like everything else in the shop — and suddenly he finds himself cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. “My daughter,” said Mrs. Tapirov, who saw his surprise, “always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.”
There is a genuine flower hiding among the artificial ones, and the harsh contrast means it jumps out with its jaws snapping: this is the real. It is in the moment that the forgery meets the genuine article, and the artificial nature of Israel’s paintings inhabits this uncanny zone. The works may seem like digital forests of artificially coloured foliage, but hidden within it, hiding out, as reality often does, is an intense representation of sensation and experience.
By Matthew Turner, London, 2019 @MjTurner_