Echo Alphabet: Katrine Bobek, Marie Rud Rosenzweig

In Katrine Bobek’s paintings, the systemic structure is embodied by
the presence of reoccurring human-like silhouettes. They appear and disappear as streams of colour emerge from a series of multi-coloured pale points, which look like flashes of light in the background. In Bloom, two figures bounce out of a field of pale dots of primary colours, walking towards the viewer through an unpaved path. They appear in a transition like the blooming field of colours around them as if they were the echoes of presences coming from another spacetime. In Kiss, we encounter two genderless bodies wrapped in large pieces of textiles that emerge from the coloured background. We never see their hands or feet. Whereas in Strings, a flower of the same size as the human-shaped figure seems to whisper that these presences exist, even though none knows of them; they were the protagonist of mythological tales that have never been narrated before.

In Marie Rud Rosenzweig’s work, the system begins with an image that is traceable to a referent. Yet, it soon dissolves into an oniric scenario of loosened objects, unconventional shapes and opaque colours. In paintings like Stem, colours have a patina which seems collected from another time, and the subject of a flower inscribed into a triangle reminds of The Little Prince’s surreal story recounting his attempt to draw an elephant inside of a snake’s body. Rud Rosenzweig’s paintings are populated by arcane entities whose identity dissolves into a composed, yet eerie, combination of undertoned colours, shapes and forms. Her paintings seems to hide something within the images they show, as if an essential part of the work remains invisible to the eyes.

As the title of the show anticipates, Rud Rosenzweig and Bobek’s paintings present the ‘alphabet’ of their individual visual language, communicating feelings, thoughts and desires through the echoes of colours, shapes and forms. An echo is a sound that reverberates and repeats because the waves bounce back off smooth, hard objects, the same way a rubber ball bounces off the ground. As the ball changes trajectory, so does sound. By changing direction, the echo never reverberates the same way as the original sound.

The show combines these visual poems into a structure that helps the imagination to enter otherly realms, transforming these paintings into stereograms where, only by observing carefully and profoundly, we can start perceiving the presence of something that the eye could not see before.