In Gabriele Basch’s new paper cutouts and recent gouaches, white inscribes the work process into the works themselves – it is often both starting point and result, means and message. The gouaches are the result of numerous layers that begin with the pouring and dripping on white paper. The scattered marks of the random forms create accidental structures that are then interwoven with calculated figures in such a way that they become part of a collective rhythm. The contours of the forms burn themselves into the eyes of the viewer like the imprint on the retina after a bright flash.

In cutouts such as burn (2010) one has the impression of a diffuse memory of something seen or familiar. Entwined, overgrown and de-familiarised by chaotic ornament, the paper cutouts contain elements of our reality such as wire-mesh fences, nets, plants, ruins and birds.

The paradoxical situations for human understanding that Edgar Allan Poe describes are the same as those that feed Basch’s works: they are both artefact and product of nature, chance and calculation, shaded and white, interpretable and uninterpretable signs. In the grammar of everyday forms.

www.basch.de/