Project in collaboration with Axel Koschier

BMUKK-Tokyo Stipendium, First Price Generación 2011, Caja Madrid

 

​

2009/2011

Installation. Loop video projection (HDV), flat screen with loop video (HDV),

a Hantarex monitor with loop video, wood. Variable dimensions

​

​

 

Belén Rodríguez and Axel Koschier have been working together in search of concurrent or complementary objectives. Both the artist from Valladolid and the one from Vienna have devised various formal strategies taking advantage of different intertwined techniques that share the minimal and sophisticated yet handcrafted use of new media for capturing, reproducing and generating images, particularly of machines, and their possibilities for extension into

three dimensions.

​

The purpose that many of the works by both artists have in common is to redimension notions of time and space, enlarging them artificially to highlight them and make them richer and clearer to our senses, which have fallen into mediocrity due to routine and have been anesthetised by the deluge of images

preselected by the media.

​

All of this usually results in silent works that begin in the commonplace and everyday to later, in successive waves, bring forth the poetical. These are fairly abstract works with a deep conceptual root that nonetheless turn out secretively to be deeply expressive and meaningful.

​

In this sense, we meet a Belén Rodríguez who

widens the notion of the sculptural with a photocopy machine covered in red and blue threads that spits out imperfect sheets from a school notebook; with Simple animación where the changes in air turn a flag with a grid print into a film that imposes on the reticle the displacement of its Cartesian order, or with Línea del tiempo where a relationship

is established between the symbolic sphere of time and space measurement for one day and its realistic representation.

 

Meanwhile, it has also been possible to see Koschier altering the course of the ordinary by throwing confetti and firecrackers from a roof to create fireworks by hand, working on the real space of a room or street with light reserves by means of graphic retouching software, presenting his collages of photos

of a square of sky near an airport and the repetitions and variations of the planes’ passage or his simulations of television’s white noise by scanning blank pages or crossword puzzles.

​

Therefore, there is nothing strange in this duo. After having met each other in Berlin and Vienna while studying fine art, in 2009 they obtained a joint residence grant in Japan. During those six months the Special Effects project was conceived, including the construction of the structure with the video

installation that won an award in Generación 2011.

​

Special Effects originated in a perceptive

capture of the everyday, taking advantage of the displacement in experience represented by a trip to a cultural context as shocking for Europeans as that of Japan. Based on their disconnection with routine and consequent increase in sensory attention, the artists

searched for and found subtle unforeseen revelations in light and sound: synchronies, lovely combinations, accidental beauty, etc. Marvels that we usually overlook.

​

Therefore, backed by humour and perplexity, always impetuous, they both returned to something customary in their individual work: the juxtaposition of reality and its representation through reproduction by means of dismantling and reassembling it in a different

way. In this joint work, they reveal in a very

pure way variations, anomalies and furrows of time and space, pulsations that alter our linear notions and incite us to another relationship with the world.

​

​

Abel H. Pozuelo

 

​