Christoph Tannert „Pictures Like the Curves in Question Marks”

What happens in these pictures titled Becoming Blue, which, taking all its meanings permits various interpretations – from ‘turning blue’ with a view to the azure backgrounds, to ‘saddening’ or ‘getting
into a state’? Anouk Kruithof is aware that the color blue is traditionally regarded as the color of the
sky and of water and that it symbolizes distance, infinity, divinity, and the “spiritual”. The actions of
her picture personnel stands in obvious contrast to any mood of meditation and relaxation. Blue are the good spirits, not the spirits of confusion. With singleness of purpose, the artist keeps this conflict in mind within her pictures, and even pushes it forward. Blue thereby alters its effect, increasingly losing its solely positive charge, and blurring in an emotional or psychological interim state within which the picture’s figures are spun. Are these figures staging’s of Anouk Kruithof’s wild imaginings? Are they spastics, insane characters, personnel that tries like actors to make us aware of psychological content that cannot be expressed with voluntary effort? It seems as if these figures were anchored a little outside our world, at the boundary between frightening monstrosity and what is determinable, as if a turbine of fate were constantly blowing them back and forth between solid ground and the abyss. The 21 figurative pictures and 3 still life’s by this young artist are so powerfully gripping that they are able to retain their mystery. They aren’t snapshots or documentary photos chattering away. But nor do they dream off into nebulosity – or if they do, then in the direction of heavenly cloud formations in metaphorical soul-windows. Only René Magritte could have told us a thing or two about it. On the one hand, the pictures of figures take on an effective power in the context of expression that can be connected to a loss of orientation. On the other hand, the still life’s, with their glimpse of an unclear, fictional place that arouses fears of being trapped, reinforce the impression of confusion – incrementally from picture to picture. Only once does a door cracked open signal a way out. By taking as her theme the unconscious, where time turns in a circle in feverish waves, the artist responds to the current feeling of panic that corresponds frighteningly with the now unbounded lack of knowledge of the consequences of human action in the crises adding up at present. This photographic series, created in several sessions between 2006 and 2008 and now presented in four different formats, takes the form of a question mark. It begins in vagueness, curves first to one, then the other side of clarity, only to end up in vagueness again. Each curve in the question mark is a piece of a riddle. And so it cannot be completely grasped with the gymnastics of speech. To create her series of pictures Becoming Blue, the artist invited people with remarkable individuality and specific expressive behavior. Anouk Kruithof spends lots of time in public spaces just studying people’s behavioral dispositions and the faces of their souls. This may sound odd. But the exceptional results prove the value of her approach. Everyone who was willing to work with the artist had to put on a blue piece of clothing of their choice and agree not to avoid uncertainty. Each person experienced and shaped the studio situation in his or her own way. What emerges from this interaction between artist and invitee is thus the pictorial interim results of a surprise (perhaps even of a confrontation) and of a segment of artistic experience, but to a degree they are also portraits – unusual likeness, of course, because, as the pictorial results reveal, the participants in these 3- to 4-hour sessions are present with their entire physical and mental existence and their own expressive and responsive behavior, displaying composure, alertness, or fright. Some sit on their chairs like an opening into nothingness, as if they were letting time blow through them. Others seem as if they wanted to detonate their psychological burden in the next instant. While photographing her counterparts, Anouk Kruithof’s unpredictable interventions repeatedly and bit by bit built up and tore down an arc of tension, from a phase of becoming acquainted through a mood of being at her mercy, to a phase of relaxation. The result is pictures of apparitions as if from a neurotic interstitial world. Strange fingers or third arms in the picture, a needle in a hand, or hair on a back are chance products that were not retouched and that make these encounters and the resulting radical pictorial production so extraordinary. Anouk Kruithof stages ambiguity and multiple meanings on a clear, classical photographic foundation, elaborated with conceptual stringency.
For the presentation of her project Becoming Blue, she developed a wall and room concept that also
includes a ca. 45-cubic-meter installation in the middle of the room. It consists of piles of at least
4,000 books whose workmanship, various papers, and varying bodies result in a heterogeneous
ensemble. Colored edges glow in diverse hues. All of this produces a landscape image that can be
experienced with the body and that engages in dialog with the blue background of the portraits, with a poetic verve. This thinking in color and in the characteristics of pictures is the clearest evidence that, for Anouk Kruithof, the process of elaborating the photos is not coincidental or done for its own sake, not an experiment or test run, but a procedure carried out in accordance with the rules of beauty, i.e., in the knowledge of the characteristics of aesthetic perception – and thus artistically necessary.

by Christoph Tannert
translation by Mitch Cohen