| back |  |
| Wim Bosch
composes his pictures digitally from various photographs of his own and other illustrations, for example from home decorating magazines or from the Internet. As in painting, the empty, white surface forms the point of departure for the illusion of a reality reproduced in photography consisting primarily of independent pictorial elements. Though the individual components come together in a coherent order, the various perspectives, effects of light and shadow and the colour accentuations create an atmosphere of unreality and artificiality closely approaching photorealistic effects. A few details – a missing shadow, breaks in perspective or spatial relations that are not completely logical – reveal the constructed nature of the pictorial context which is nonetheless sealed off and held together by a homogeneous surface as an “outer skin”. Wim Bosch constructs interiors that with their furnishings and accessories look rather ordinary and everyday. But the items distributed in the room, a figure beyond the boundaries of the picture or abruptly cut off by them make the impression that an extraordinary event has just taken place here. As at the scene of a crime, something that has happened seems to be concentrated here, and the viewer attempts to investigate, but without being able to find enough clues about it. However, a context of action can hardly be put together. What becomes visible is rather a structural order in the interplay of various ornamental structures, perspectival situations and pictorial analogies. The point is therefore not so much to link the pictorial worlds to an external reality as to discover relationships and contradictions within the picture. Dr.Christoph Kivelitz (director Kunstverein Dortmund) October 2005 "The Dutchman Wim Bosch also uses the potential of digital image processing. But his computer-generated picture montages, by contrast, play precisely with the reality character of the portrayed objects. The brave new world of consumer goods presented in advertising brochures or pictures taken from the Internet serve as his raw material for surreal staging in which disparate realms of reality meet each other. These things seem to be familiar, they have been seen a hundred times, but the viewer stumbles over the breaking points in the logical structure. A constructed disorder and emphasis on the cropped character transform these rooms into crime scenes in which the viewer looks for clues and evidence. Shadows that are lacking or floors that suddenly open up contradict the materiality that we know the objects to have, they make the sudden stroke of the miraculous visible. The viewer searches for possible connections, constructs a history that could give this world of things a meaning. But the dramas play only in our heads, they remain pure fiction". "An often cited quotation by the Count of Lautréamont – the pseudonym of the French intellectual Isidore Lucien Ducasse (1846-1870), one of the most important forerunners of the Surrealists – reads: “Surrealism is as beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella with a sewing machine on a dissection table.” Wim Bosch makes us bear witness – as does Eric Jan van der Geer with his photo-graphics – to just this sort of strange encounter in his photographic imagery in painting-like format. He definitely does not represent the absolute and abstract Surrealism of, for example, Joan Miró, but rather the veristic, critical-paranoid Surrealism of the juxtaposition of unrelated things or distorted perspective, represented first and foremost by Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. It is not the surrealists at all, however, who first come to mind in an iconographical exploration of Bosch’s work, but much more the phenomenal interiors of Jan Vermeer (1632-1675). His meticulous realism, the smooth surfaces, the use of bold primary colours, the virtuoso use of light, the interest in rendering the most diverse textures and the relaying of their tactile, touchable seductiveness, the fascinating, perfect construction of the scene, the staging of contemplative solitary figures, the appeal to several senses – one finds all of this in Wim Bosch’s work". |