Black, white, lines weaving in and out of each other, centripetal and centrifugal forces, rhythms, dynamically flowing, positive and negative traces; remains. Between found and invented, unconscious and conscious, past and present, between the original and alienated, Veronika Wenger‘s works reveal to us a sensual insight.

Outlines and volumes of a woman‘s body, of a dancer barely recognizable — the plastic appears only as a formal quality. The physical not only determines our perception; the physical is found on the side of the perceived. The abstract drawings make it clear that the body has by no means been abolished, but (only) the modalities of its representation have been transformed.

The drawings by Wenger can be seen, as if listening to them read out in another language that evokes both linear and open spatial surfaces, to put it somewhat paradoxically. Her works oscillate between a free figurativeness that is devoid of any description of the object and a poetizing representationalism of often only vaguely hinted at architectures, figures or language. The possibilities of drawing are carefully explored: linear and coloured movements, rhythmic structures, still and delicate, dynamic and rapid. But the drawings on paper, MDF and cardboard show nothing of the physical reality, they are not even abstract in the sense that they are a shortage of something found, they are simply non-representational. On a monochrome ground, lines, fleeting strokes, are to be found, which draw, cross and circle. Colour is added, but remains locally limited — which makes them all the more expressive.

They are fragments, signs, forms, traces, letters and lines of a mental, inner world. It is the presence and absence of the trace, its appearance and disappearance, its storage and being remembered, or its loss and lost absence that draws us under the spell of her works.

The proximity of memory to writing, one of her vehicles, is obvious. Writing frees daily facts of life from the vortex of forgetting. At the same time, however, it translates all primary experiences (what we see before one another), what we experience, even the shaking of love and death. Thus the works appear as a meaningful juxtaposition of chaos and straightforwardness that creates a dialogue between memories of traces, choreography, dance or performance. A cosmos of connections and references that can be found again and again in the serial works. A continuous element is the line, which both separates and connects. The emotional-objective lines, whose beautiful autonomy can be addictive, frees the line from the ground or the ground from the line, and yet both are preserved. It connects the visible forms to an endless connection between inside and outside, surface and form. It reinforces a symmetry of depth dimension. Through its rhythmic division, the experience of depth, movement, the conscious and the unconscious is created, whereby the works not least gain in temporality.

Sophie-Charlotte Bombeck
Munich 2020

Text published in the catalog:
VERONIKA WENGER | DIE LINIE / THE LINE