Material and Light
Something I often ask myself when looking at a work of art is whether or not I would like to live with it. A painting can move you in the deepest levels of yourself without you actually wanting to have it before your eyes each and every day. It may be for the violence of the theme, the all too crude way of depicting the darker side of humanity, or for its excessively incisive presence, a work of art can be an object of profound admiration in a collection or museum whilst being just too much to live with.
As with music or writing, a painting is also a language. There is the time for deciphering, that moment when the contemplation attempts to penetrate the language unknown to you. That is followed by a period when each looks at the other, you and the painting, a time when one searches for the other, observes, you get to know each other, you get closer, and then you move apart, take a step backwards. Finally comes that time when each party makes their peace with the other, as an acknowledgement, a sign of acceptance.
What moved me when coming face to face with Anke’s creations was that they could become friends. Although this may take time. Living with a painting is very similar to following the path of friendship; each must learn to live with the other, which in turn has to do with the distance and space allotted to the other. In the same way as two people living together, over time, come to resemble one another, their delves and furrows complementing.
In my opinion Anke’s work arises from a form of meditation in which material and light combine. Light plays an important part in her work, under differing declinations, always present, as with some skies above the sea that seem to be impregnated with water particles giving them an infinite softness as opposed to the metallic blue skies found inland.
And of course there is the fabric, the linen, these materials which send us back to the very warmth of the earth’s crust.
The marvellous sensation which Anke’s work leaves me is one of creation, the creation of he who contemplates, a place for dreams, for the imagined and this, the leaving of the space, is a sign of a true and rare generosity in an artist.
Rapheäl Doko Triet. 2005