Prof. Hans - Joachim Strauch on JCW
A picture itself is nothing! The true value arises through the relation between the viewer and the art and their ensuing relationship. After all JCW's pictures are no longer photographs, they transcend the concept, they are digital transformations. The true name for what JCW creates today is not yet established. You have to leave the concept of the photo to approach these pictures. Because a photo is associated differently. He is unique and stands out of what we have been used to. - „And at every beginning, there is a magic..." - as Hermann Hesse once put it. But what if we expand the previously known limits of our perceptions, viewing habits and evaluations? As you know, our crucial organ of perception is not the eye but our memory. You see what you know or want to see. And we think that's reality.
However - the pictures of the exhibition give you excitement and reflection to see yourself.
Pictures accompany us all our lives. There are visions that we carry in us, in unmixed but imaginary and longed for images. There are pictures that follow us, that reflect our desires, make us hope.
The images of JCW have something strong, magical, gliding from almost still real associations down to picturesque echoes, but also finely chiselling graphic effects that would not actually be imaginable, even further: the images become abstract transfers of the original information that are transitory from photographs.
We live in a digital world: JCW likes to refer to the mathematician Bionoit Mandelbrot. He designed in mathematical models image patterns of truly infinite depth. Generating digital art is not a mechanical one but always a creative process. The digital tools are complex and continue what JCW once studied in Dresden with pencil and paintbrush with the tools of the digital age.
In the past he painted and drew, today he not only designs cities and landscapes but transforms photographs and huge amounts of data into new worlds of images - THE PHOTOSCAPES. Working on images of this dimension creates again and again a loop that can always be the prerequisite for another pictorial, an artistic scenario of a new dimension.
And out of all these layers is the final composite image. Thus, the images gain in complexity and depth.
New and surprising dimensions of reality can be discovered - but our natural senses have not been suited to their habit so far. Only with the help of new technologies, we can make visible what goes beyond our everyday perception. The new technical possibilities allow us to transgress the thresholds of our previous perception - to grow ourselves as well. Behind it opens up a new - augmented reality. A world in which events become visible, which otherwise would remain hidden to us. It remains a fascination to be on the track of the hidden dimension.
