• Tobias Buche
• Jonas Lipps

We could think of Tobias Buche’s (1978, Berlin) work as a form of collectionism, a meticulous and continuous method, a private gathering which becomes public, shared, in the moment in which the artist displays it, in which he puts it “on show” with his installations.

The object of his collection is the image, Buche gathers different kinds of them, by subject and source. The images include private photographs, record covers, old drawings, newspaper clippings, reproductions, a heterogeneity that characterizes not only the genesis of the work, but which resurfaces also in the way in which the images are organized in his pieces.

Buche deploys his personal visual encyclopedia on simple panels or, as in this case, on white tables, neutral, props capable of not intruding on or confusing the reading of the images.
The composition is born from the juxtaposition of the elements, in a combinatory dynamic that excludes every linear logic. The gaze freely runs over the images, the possibility to interweave infinite narrations is an integral part of the work which presents itself as a kind of hypertext.
The impression is of a work-in-progress in which the images can be continuously recomposed, reordered, as is demonstrated by the small signs left by the pins used to attach them. A complex constellation of images, private photos or figures collected from newspapers, chosen or manipulated by the artist so as not to be able to identify the provenance so that all, equally, may be objects of a new possible gaze.

Jonas Lipps (1979, Freiburg), works with watercolors on papers of different formats and characteristics, leaflets, pages from books or from old notebooks.
The initial images are collected from newspapers, the internet or from photographs, and are landscapes, portraits, often ordinary situation, anonymous fragments that the artist revises.
The composition recalls stills of a film in which the action is taking place elsewhere. The artist calls attention to incomplete, casual gestures, not at all emblematic.
Lipps chooses in many cases props that seem badly adapted to watercolor, damaged or stained paper, sheets of diverse qualities that cause a loss of continuous control of technique. It is precisely the precarious balance between keeping and losing the control of the piece that is the basis of his work.
Watercolor is the appropriate medium for a method that continuously confronts itself with the limits of representation, with the impossibility of communicating of the entire complexity of the real if not through attempts that inevitably fail.