Imagine a time-lapse film shown too quickly – all one could make out would be stripes of colour, shapes merging, drifting apart, determined solely by their colour value. The same experience as when driving at high speed, when cities, people, landscapes whizz past the window, forming a neverending stream of merging impressions, predominantly determined by colours. Due to immense speed, the shapes and contents in both examples appear as stripes of colour- colour impressions determined by the speed, i.e. time in motion. The concrete is lost in the quick passage of time, in which it marks but a very brief moment. Only the snapshot in the work of art transforms this impression back into eternity.

These two examples are not an attempt at interpreting the works of art by Claudia Desgranges. Rather, they serve as proof of the dominance of colour in the perception in movement. Though the perception lacks details, the colours alone are able to convey mood values, a mood of the painting as a whole, and thus overall impressions.

Movement in time is a subject that is comprehensible in the works created by Claudia Desgranges even in the strict brushstrokes when applying the paint. In controlled, carefully placed applications of paint next to and on top of each other in several varnished layers of mixed colours, we experience both movement and time. Next to the discontinuations, the resuming motion, more often than not a new colour, however, never seems to form a sharp, abrupt contour but always remains flowing, merging. The horizontal movement appears dominant, though at times it is also vertical, suggesting rhythm and accent, even interruption, or with the horizontal movement producing an intensification of colour similar to a textile structure of warp and weave. Colour progressions and combinations are the predominant subject. The dialogue between the colours, the provocative colourism, and the harmonious change in colours are of suggestive sensuousness, providing aesthetic incentives of seeing. In this we find expressed the particular joy of the artist of experimenting with colours, their mood, their interaction, their temperament, and their presence.

The new works by Claudia Desgranges are painted on an aluminium basis, a smooth, fine, cold-gleaming metal surface that appears to be floating flat on the exhibition walls, invisibly held at a distance. Parts of the background have been left untouched, metal reflexes gleaming through delicate layers of colour, unfolding their own game of light and colours. Depending on the thickness of the colour applied, the light is captured and reflected on the ground in varying intensity, producing the effect of an inner brightness of the work and of the colours. Once the paint has dried, it sticks to the ground. The subject of „time“ can also be traced in the development, the overlapping, and the drying process.

Looking at the paintings, we can see parts of our outline mirrored in the aluminium surface of this work of art, maybe even a reflection (in the true sense of the word) of ourselves. In the same way as the surrounding space and the light, we too become part of the work, are integrated into a new reality created by the artist. The work is thus determined by its surrounding and by us as the observers. In the process of reflection, we can see a rather simple, yet complex form of communication between the work and the observer.

The works virtually instigate their own activity and intensity in their interaction with us as the observers and the space surrounding both. They are, one and all, possible parts of reality in its time- and space-related dimension. In the works by Claudia Desgranges, the appearance of reality and of the objects is taken as the central theme in the question of distance between the work of art and the observer – the appropriation of reality, as existential necessity, forming the starting point of these artistic master-pieces.

Dr. Christiane Zangs, Clemens-Sels-Museum Neuss