Shaped by colour
People in the foreground – in front of landscapes, city panoramas, campfires. Kathrin Rank paints silhouettes in what seems like idyllic back light situations. But why does the observer feel an increasing twitch? Is it the airport’s window, which could be scattered by a plummeting airplane at any time, the dog staining a perfect picture by urinating against the wall, dark characters ganging up? Or is it the surface of free painting, which embeds the figures, outshines them, but at the same time dissolves them again and makes them invisible? The observer stands before of the painted figures, looking into the distance with them and wanting to tell them "Watch out, there’s something wrong!" But there is no sequence to follow. The image is the perfect moment, carrying beauty and the eerily at the same time. Art always possesses a high level of symbolic power. These works are mainly based on the expressive power of the signified and are therefore closer to allegory than to the mere image. Its a development of a specific poetry of the everyday, which allows new insights into seemingly profane subjects.
Urban Berlin life poses as a backdrop and influence but also the artistic argument with an exaggerated materialistic world plays an important role.
Kathrin Ranks paintings reveal insights and outlooks. They play with shadow and light. Backlight turns figures into silhouettes. The background pushes forward and embeds the silhouettes in colour. The superficial resigns and is put into relation to the painted surroundings. Objects fade through surface and contour. The accidental gains importance through colour. Colour is perceived as an abstract and sensual art which transforms into something pictured. The outside is a gateway for the inside, outside landscape turns to inner landscape.
Sarunas P. Kaiba, Riga
Like fossilized moments
"Feeling, laughing, painting, playing, showing, digging"
Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like if the presence itself creates an imprint of its own past? The answer to this question lays beyond the language. Only pictures can give it, like for example the pictures of Kathrin Rank. In these visual synthesises the old is condensed in the new – situations, moments, scenes, things and objects which seem ephemeral and trivial on the surface are being visualized from the depth. Moments surging up from the depth of time, moments pulsing sometimes peace and quiet and other times pure unease, appearing like the reflex of something primordial on the surface of the portrayal that interface between eye, sign and world and making perceptible the abundance of time over the depth of the painting.
Timo Kaabi Linke, Berlin / Catalogue Extract Fossile Augenblicke