Reinhard Voigt’s (*1940) third solo show with BQ includes works of his oeuvre from the 1960s until the present day. His predominant stylistic device is the structure of the raster or grid pattern that constructs his paintings and works on paper: The raster functions both to decompose the motifs on which the works are modelled and to recompose them within a new reality of the image. The representational aspect of his works and their reference to the concrete however remains significant, especially with regard to his earlier works from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Once a technical auxiliary means of transferring artistic images, the raster is now considered as a device of abstraction and of objectification of concrete uniqueness, not least due to the continuing impact of medial representation, of virtualization and digitalization. Voigt’s early drawings with crayon on graph paper nevertheless bear traits of the individual and the painterly; in contrast to merely industrial grids, one can discover shadings, gradient colours, or quadrants that are not filled in exactly or that are painted over their geometrical margin. This distinguishes Voigt’s early works from works by artists of his generation where raster, grids or screens too played a role – for example from the coeval works of Gerhard Richter, Thomas Bayrle or Peter Roehr, American Pop Artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein, and the minimalist objects produced by Sol LeWitt and others. Appearing less industrial and less technical, they seem rather to stand in the tradition of Paul Klee or Piet Mondrian. On the other hand, like the aforementioned artists of his generation, Reinhard Voigt too has selected images from an artificial reality as the model of his works: whether press illustrations or advertising, Voigt decomposes and reproduces within the context of his works what has always been a reproduced, virtual reality.
Even if Voigt’s non-serial images might sentimentally touch the contemporary beholder affected by the flood of digital images because they arouse nostalgic memories of hand-drawn knitting patterns or cross-stitches (naïve, innocent pixel images avant la lettre), one must not ignore that there is one thing that Voigt’s works have in common with the industrially produced screen prints and technically reproduced raster patterns of his contemporaries. The raster itself is a means of abstraction of the individual (which always is a deviation from the measure), a means of synthesis of a new reality and lastly, a means of the reproduction of a uniform which will be the future measure and model of man.
Overrun by the development of the digital age and its aesthetics, Voigt’s works today seem both prophetic and innocent. Images composed of raster patterns – pixels – are populating the visual realm of our experiences, and the ubiquity of these medial images provides Voigt’s works with the asynchronous appearance of imitation. Instead of giving in to the digital revolution or countering it with aesthetics of painterly, haptic knitting patterns, Voigt keeps up with the digitalization, especially as regards his models: While in the 1960s and 1970s these consisted of photographs or illustrations from magazines – the media of the time, in 1982 he paid tribute to the growing influence of the television as the predominant medium as far as the production of reality is concerned. With the painting “Videotext”, he depicted a TV frame and transferred the TV image into another medium as he has done before with photography. In the following years, he began to use pixel characters from video games and reproduce them as raster images on canvas and on paper. In this way he increased the virtuality of the image: while in the beginning of his career, Voigt repainted images of a material reality (i.e. photographs) within the context of another medium, he now did the same with mere virtual images that are not even the representation of an existing reality. Proceeding further with abstraction and pursuing the abstract logic of the raster, in recent years Voigt has been generating his works with a computer before transferring them onto canvas; correspondingly, as regards content, the model of his images has now become the medium of abstraction par excellence: language/writing (words). Voigt predominately chooses neologisms from economy, finance, and the advertising industry that do not even refer to a concrete signified but that betoken a mere virtuality without any relation to sensual materiality. Transcending the possibilities of our imagination, such words nevertheless have become a part of our everyday linguistic world. Reinhard Voigt’s artworks reflect the relationship between reality and representational image, they challenge the possibilities of abstraction by hinting at the non-abstractable residue, and not least, they confront us with the question where to position ourselves inside this field.
