Press Release

Karen Knorr
Filles du Calvaire, Paris
Exposition du 27 mars au 17 mai 2003
Vernissage le jeudi 27 mars de 18h30 à 21h30

Solo Exhibition 2003 :
Art Centre of Salamanca, Salamanque
18 June-17 August 2003

The image lands on the threshold of space like logos opening time . For the image maker and the storyteller everything is about knowing how these tools of meaning will manage to cross this threshold in order to arrive at the landscape and story. These are inventions, comprehensive and stand-alone structures which use theoretically sensitive references as tools to build a real base to shape the virtual, invisible and visible simultaneously. Knorr’s strategy is to show the essence of these representations, putting into perspective beings and objects which exist in the virtual space of the imagination.

In each of Karen Knorr’s photographs, space and time are under the influence of totally reformulated interiors by fabricated elements posed to show the outside world’s presence. These “interiors” only open on themselves, and windows operate as blinds keeping out light rays, a closed world, inside closed doors (ie: “Virgin with Child”). However Palazzo Taffini’s walls are far from being blind, thanks to the mannerist quadratura which dissolves the opaque material into optical echoes of an aerial architecture. Rooms are invaded by colours which add to to chromatic and emblematic intensity of the photographs. The arrangement of the ornaments and architectural detail structures the geography of the space to which they transfer their attributes. Through the repeatedly changing shapes these virtual architectures disturb the viewer. They trouble vision yet do not deceive the mind. Landscape as a genre is one invaded by historical narrative symbols.The work addresses the landscape through an earlier use of this in 15th and 16th century religious paintings.

As such, a living pulse is matched by the shade of a body and a profusion of flowers reflected in a mirror – “A Soul’s Purgatory”. As such the nostalgia of a lost paradise embodies itself in the majestic silence of curtain covering a wall , which invites you to an impossible path through the forbidden and purifying fire of its red fabric, in to perfect geometry created by two columns taking root in the deep and ethereal blue stucco earth upon which they stand, and by the glittering columns decorated by the golden vegetating trunk and leaves of the “Tree of Life”, which becomes the image “Heaven on Earth”. Through spiritual and allegoric references to biblical myths the titles authentify and give a sacred essence to these symbolic scenes hinted by memories as if they were the Promised Land.

The animals staged by Karen Knorr inside her work e contribute to the critical nature of the picture inside the picture. Their strange proportions make them a make believe of the living among a world ruled by aesthetic conventions. Curiously the animal brings humanity in this formal abstraction by getting inside the image. The archetypal beast refers to a deep unconscious and instinct. It resides in the archaic part of our psyche. It becomes in the picture a sort of “genius loci” which makes possible a link between the image and the spectator. It takes on the field of representation by meaning to be there “hic and nunc” as well as representing the instinctive body of the spectator as a site, an instant, a character. The myth can begin. Searching through archetypes the eye enlivens the scene, referring to remembered story. In European culture, the lamb is the archetype of the sacrifice victim, making possible one’s salvation in the forever after beyond life a renew- al of victory of life against death. Where else than on the imaginary terrain of mythologies (and religion) can two interlocked lambs lying on church’s floor be “Virgin with Child”?

In fact, these landscape screen us more than we screen them, extracting our inner representations as does the owl of “Annunciation” staring at us from the center of the picture. The unexpected gospel brought by this animal to the revelation might be the paradoxical mystery of a perception active in the latency of make believe, carrying immaterial yet persistent sensations. Night bird, moon bird, the owl cannot bear sunlight. It is outside and blind when light catches it and reveals it. However its eyes are lit. They are vividly and sharply. The owl is the attribute of diviners. It symbolises the gift of clear vision through the signs translated cunning. Athena’s bird embodies thinking and imagination against darkness through which it leads us.


Natural Histories, Nathalie Leleu, September 2001