Jochen Klein

Current Projects
tabletop

Untitled 1 (2007)
40cm x 50cm C-print

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tabletop (continued)

The ´tabletop` series plays with our response to landscape – the deeply unspoken that we sense
in nature as well as tendencies of deconstruction and rationalization. The photographs invite the
viewers to discover their own response to nature and explore – or switch between - illusion
and disillusion, nostalgia and irony, truth and untruth within the images; the viewers can double-check
their response.

With the series I want to explore the possibility of an instinctive response to nature before
ratio comes in. The danger of kitsch and clichés is never too far when it comes to landscape imagery.
Judgements about kitsch are easily made, but pretty much learnt, they stand as signifiers for taste
and education and are tools to distinguish low culture from high culture.

The photographs stand as models for that instinct↔ratio tension. I am interested in what once were
not clichés but serious attempts to give appearances in nature a name and meaning, to use them as symbols
to say something through them, to express an inner landscape of the mind. And while I deeply appreciate
that once revolutionary gesture I find it difficult (and unnecessary) today to just continue to speak in the same
metaphorical language without being untrue. To stay authentic I want to transform these cultural leftovers,
question a certain symbolism and find a balance between what I want to pay tribute to and what I want to
challenge – an attempt to develop my own metaphorical landscape within that body of work and find truth
in what seems untrue in the first place.

Jochen Klein, November 2007


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