La Ticla 02 Print

"It is the artist's mission to penetrate as far as may be toward that secret ground where primal law feeds growth. Which artist would not wish to dwell at the central organ of all motion in space-time (be it the brain or the heart of creation) from which all functions derive their life? In the womb of nature, in the primal ground of creation, where the secret key to all things lies hidden? Our beating heart drives us down, far down to the primal ground." (Paul Klee) The world around us has become colorful, its information structures marked by vivid images. Whereas up until recently linear text was still used as our means of codification, nowadays surfaces are increasingly important (photos, TV screens, projection screens) for conveying information. As in an illiterate context, pictures are once again the official media. Pictures did not disappear with the invention of the printing press (they were only banished to the realm of illustration and representation), just as the written word will certainly not be replaced by images. Instead a dialectic approach to picture and text is called for: if one combines text with concepts, or pictures with imagination, the result is a more imaginative conception and a more conceptual imagination. Meanwhile electronic images are becoming instruments that penetrate the linear structure of texts and thus become texts themselves. One has the impression of simultaneousness and multi-layered stratification, as in a psychedelic experience. According to Marshall McLuhan "in the age of electronic media, one-after-the-other is replaced by all-at-once ..." This refers not only to the much cited flood of images that often results in an information jam, but also to the fact that one now seems closer to surmounting time and space. Obviously the field of art is also affected by these developments and absorbs them in its ideological models. For some time now, a virulent discourse of private and public language can be observed. In a kind of meta-language of image and text, a critical young generation of artists reflects about such instruments as literary quotations, advertising, comic strips or, as in the following case, about the long tradition of pictography. Franz Konrad, who during extended sojourns in Mexico became acquainted with native American cultures which he combines with his own western capitalistic upbringing, advances along this previously mentioned path of simultaneousness.