Three artistic interventions by artist Claudia Desgranges to and on Bonn properties of the MIWO Apartment Building and Management Company in the Rhineland

In connection with the artist project “kunstundwohnen” (art and living), the Cologne artist Claudia Desgranges has placed herartistic interventions in public spaces in different phases of work. She has accomplished this by considerably changing the premises and the impression made by the apartment buildings with her use of film, objects, painting, and by intervening in the architecture.

In her painting, her main creative medium, for many years now Claudia Desgranges has been dealing with interpreting painting as a phenomenon that yields space and time. In the course of her artistic work, she first switched her medium material, from canvas painting to painting on aluminum, and then in further steps projected components of painterly attribution even more intensively into space, Thus, she has managed to wrest from painting itself a factor of placing it openly in space and time. In the first action initiative for the project “kunstundwohnen” Claudia Desgranges projected a film onto an apartment building on Irmintrudisstraße Street, covering the surface of the house with confusing pictures at the onset of dusk. In her film Claudia Desgranges has mixed sequences of abstraction and painting with the everyday situations and utilitarian objects she found, these being constantly overlaid upon one another. This is how she does justice to the aspect that our looking, perceiving and incorporating of reality in human consciousness is always tied to the ability to repeatedly go back from the object and from the concrete situation to the level of abstraction and composition. This interplay between the realistic and the abstract, between the concrete and the immaterial, which the artist persistently brings into correlation in her work, is something Claudia Desgranges has overlaid in the film sequence, as it were, in layers, then confronting the reality of a house façade precisely with that element of perception. For this film Claudia Desgranges has taken entirely concrete pictures of her own work as if in a color diary, crossfading them with everyday situations. From this practical implementation, the theme for the overall project within the action initiative was developed as well. For months, Claudia Desgranges went around with a small camera. In Munich and Cologne she filmed everyday situations, collecting many hours of film material. By crossfading her own abstract works, a rhythmic color succession resulted in flowing sequences that mirror what is in the public domain with what is private and the general with the individual, so to speak, thus reproducing a portrait also of the “inner life” of such an apartment house. The second and, as it were, third intervention Claudia Desgranges carried out she also realized at Irmintrudisstrasse Street. In doing so, the artist on the one hand structured the metal ledge above the rows of garages in a painterly fashion, and on the other hand highlighted the driveway to the garages with color objects. In the 1950s the garage driveways had been laid out with pavement slabs, some of them highlighted with color. Claudia Desgranges partially replaced these slabs, so wellworn over the course of the last decades, with new ones which, however, structure the area in front of the garages more clearly and colorfully in an apparently unsystematic rhythm. The contrast between the very colorful slabs and their surfaces, which are smoother in comparison to the older ones, causes our eye to constantly try to reconstruct the procedure. Precisely also due to the apparent “incalculability” of the slab placements that do not seem to follow any recognizable system, the viewer must concentrate time and again on concrete and direct perception. The eye wanders back and forth constantly, making the fluid character and the process clear in this way. Claudia Desgranges herself reports: “ When I first saw the courtyard, I immediately noticed the pavement slabs from the 1950s that had been restricted to three colors in a regular pattern. Many of them were heavily damaged from decadelong use. I replaced them with new colored slabs.” With respect to the even rhythm of the old pavement as well as the previously limited selection of color, the artist deviated by exchanging only the damaged pavement slabs, thus creating an entirely new arhythmic course on the ground. The artist then referred to the colors placed on the ground on a second level of creation. Claudia Desgranges takes direct recourse to her primal artistic repertory in the aluminum ledge above the row of garages. Color surfaces almost 12 meters in width, which she has highlighted with strips of color, appear like a spectral impulse going from left to right and from right to left. The perceptual flow reveals itself as if it were blurred in a timing pulse, and develops a visually dynamic experience of color and space. The color on the aluminum carrier has been consciously applied like a glaze, imbuing it with a color sensation quality that exists in space before the actual surface. The color values are also constantly changed due to the way they have been tied into the outside space. The varying light during the day, changes in the weather, and to a certain extent also the reflections on the metal surfaces change the color values from minute to minute. The style and the proportions remain in flux so that here, as well as previously in the real film, an apparently uninterrupted virtual continuum comes about. Contrasts and apparent opposites are constantly connected to each other. The color values Claudia Desgranges uses here have differing “temperatures”. Due to this, over and over again areas of attraction and repulsion, acceleration and deceleration, as well as the different perception of cold and warm come about. In the outside space where this painting is now concretely located, it seems to be an absolutely natural process, further enhanced here in the context of the real given spatial situation by the actual change of factors such as light, time and temperature.

If you are familiar with Claudia Desgranges’s works, you are no longer astonished by the extremely long, frieze type color relief above the garage doors, since her real picture placements in exhibitions and in other locations also tend to be extremely longstretched formats these days, not lastly in order to capture the character of speed and time. It is clear that Claudia Desgranges has been dealing with film sequences for many years, although lately the concrete film works constitute an even further step. The medium of film and the succession of images in film are what interest the artist, and the interventions she undertakes in the second and third part of the stations of “kunstundwohnen” correspond exactly to her artistic convictions.

In the third project realization on Adolfstrasse Street the artist then divided a glass stairwell that looks like a window façade from the outside completely into color rectangles and squares. In doing this she makes reference to the preexisting window frame structures, which she then subjects to her own syncopal placement of color fields. Here as well, the light shining from the stairwell from the inside to the outside plays a significant role, suffusing the color fields with such a concrete immaterial presence in space that it detaches itself from its actual carrier, in this case glass. The sequence of color in turn plays with the varying temperatures and color values and translates these, as it were, into a system of coordinates. This coding of color, which also largely operates with the metaphors of time and speed, is not to be limited in its determinacy, so to speak. The possibilities of the combination and interaction of color in this context are virtually unlimited so that here the artist very consciously makes a decision with respect to the individual location, which however continues to open other alternatives in our perception.

After Detlef Beer accentuated the intimate relationship between the picture and the apartment, after Friedhelm Falke brought about a persistent change in weaving a unit consisting of the apartment and the picture, after Martin Noël planted into our consciousness “stumbling blocks” of perception in seven different action initiatives that place their special emphasis at various places, Claudia Desgranges now pursues the goal of setting space and the environment into motion and, by means of her subtle timing pulse interventions, launching a process, which changes the mood and atmosphere of the places beyond pure perception.

Dr. Gabriele Uelsberg, Director of the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn