RUMINATIO

Each of her images opens up to an infinite number of potential images. Anja Bayerwaltes arranges all of them in sequences – as if they were to remain trials or a perpetual exercise, which, in its infinite repetition of ever the same motives, refuses an ultimate result. Following Peter Sloterdijkʼs credo: “We only do what we can, and we can only do what we are constantly repeating,” these are daily retreats, rituals and yes, exercises. Who exercises follows a passion.

Who exercises, wants to perfect, and thus become perfect. Exercise means to be fully present in the devotion to something – oblivious of surroundings, immersed. Freed from the pressure of the everyday; alternating in repetition, variation and repetition.

Ruminatio is a term for it. Taken from the practise of monks, from the rhetoric of Quintilian, the term has always been known as a strategy of intense appropriation by frequent repetition. Like inhaling and exhaling, ruminatio is a sensually repetitive apprehension of reality, a kind of mental exercise, if you like, that never ends in a lifetime, and never has a final manifestation.

Helga Scholl, Curator at Raum für Kunst, Aachen, Germany
Catalogue of the solo exhibition RUMINATIO, 8 September – 20 October 2018
Original text: German Translation: Nathalie Bertrams

PERFECT DAY

The view out of the window onto the landscape or the street while keeping a close watch on incidents, colour atmospheres, and light phenomena determines the oeuvre of Anja Bayerwaltes. It is always an abstracting pictorial view that she transforms into a perceptual image, either by means of a reduced drawing or a coloured conversion, merging fore- and background layers and forcing the viewer to take a close and selective look. In doing so, Anja Bayerwaltes seeks the uniqueness of a moment in everyday life resulting from constellations of persons, objects and most of all chromatic values and matching the sensation of a perfect day. Yet, due to her adaptation of reality, the perceptual process itself evolves into the subject matter. One of her series shows landscapes behind a curtain, which is partly colour-shifted due to interior lighting. The curtain’s net lace design with its loops and waves, however, does not represent an alien element eclipsing the landscape section. The landscape is rather a tessellated re-invention into the previously painted curtain grid – mechanically separated, yet optically tied – creating an abstract picture with a multitude of autonomous surface areas. Painting – no replica of reality.

As for Anja Bayerwaltes’ latest works, the powerful chromaticity was reduced in favour of tonal effects, with the nightly neon-light silhouettes hardly perceivable in the background. The indefinable shimmering between foreground and background, the perception of the image reading and focusing process and the peculiar resulting Sfumato interspace are Anja Bayerwaltes’ contribution to the classical problem of flat surface depth depiction that she has been dealing with over the past 10 years. The paintings spread the visual material and enable visual dynamics with daydream quality. The watercolour paintings accentuate the colour experience to abstract autonomous surface areas, partly by punctuation, partly by reflections; the drawings reduce the message of the image beyond comic traditions into a kind of linear haiku, an autonomous graphic.

Dr. Dirk Tölke, art historian and journalist
Referring to the solo exhibition PERFECT DAY, Kunstverein Heinsberg, 23 Juni-14 Juli 2013
Original text: German Translation: Christel Buchty