Jeanne Faust
7th June-26th July 2007
Curated by Astrid Wege
ar/ge kunst Galleria Museo
via Museo 29
I 39100 Bolzano/Bozen
www.argekunst.it
What I have seen, I won’t talk about is what Jeanne Faust entitles her exhibition in the Gallery Museum, Bolzano, and so focuses attention on one of the central themes of her artistic work: the relationship between images and language.
The moments of imagination, of projections and emotions that stick to the perception and interpretation of images play a major part in Jeanne Fausts films and photographic work. These pictures, which form her new series and are exhibited here for the first time as a solo show, pick up these elements. They refer to media pictures that try to capture significant events in a concise image and, through the repetition of the same or similar motifs, coagulate to become stereotypical signs.
Jeanne Faust uses such pictures as patterns for her silhouettes and photographs them
again. The work then passes through various stages of medial transformations and interpretations, until a connection to the motif of the initial picture becomes almost impossible. Yet a feeling of discomfort results, though or precisely because an almost frightening beauty inhabits the works. For example, when the picture of a festively decorated street of houses fails to reveal that a fire had recently broken out there.
Jeanne Faust is intrigued by the power of seduction that beautiful surfaces possess and distrusts it completely. In her film IV she shows in a similar way the discrepancy between the linguistic approach to the image and the picture as described. As the title of the exhibition suggests, sometimes it is best to say nothing. Yet, Jeanne Fausts pictorial language is extremely eloquent and refined.
Jeanne Faust was born in 1968 in Wiesbaden and lives in Hamburg. She has had numerous exhibitions and is nominated for the National Gallerys Prize for Young Art, Hamburger Bahnof, Berlin, in 2007. What I have seen, I wont talk about is Jeanne Fausts first solo show in Italy.