Melusine Eichhorn: "Let's get lost"

The moor attracts. Anybody who goes astray on the moor runs the risk to sink and to stay. Enclosed therein, to give up ones life. The body preserves itself over an undetermined length of time. Minimum decomposition and transformation takes place. Animals and plants are rare. The moor is just so. It seems to be a condition in its essence. On the surface is a fine colour modulation of flowering and dying peat moss to be seen, one of the rare plants on the moor. The preservation of this unusual landscape today is a tightrope walk. Just the growing of birches that drain the soil of water disturbs the natural balance of the moor. Damage to this cultural landscape is irretrievable,  because   a moor needs thousands of years to slowly redevelop. Today the  landscape is under protection. The artificial preservation of  an ancient vegetation, that appears to us as a picture of eternity.

In a description taken from Wikipedia about the location  Zone  of the film Stalker  by Andrei Tarkowski it says :

„In this zone strange things happen, there are baffling apparitions and the cause can only be presumed as the time of the action is already years ago“

In the pictures of Kerstin Vornmoor I see references  to this unusual place. The geometric and floral ornaments on her paintings are reminiscent of the forms of this landscape and its sparse vegetation.

Plants, crystals, signs and figures can be made out. In their many layers, drawn over the format of the canvas, they stretch themselves to a fine mass.

In Step into my office, Baby (Belle & Sebastian) the printed pieces are lifted from a perceptible denseness to a weightless slow shimmering dance. The repetition of the individual subject and their superimposition conditioned by the screen printing process produces dynamics as in Sounds of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel).motifs allow for a variety of small explosions. In Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush), there are artistic moments : the veering off course and smudging of the yellow tones on canvas by the seemingly relaxed sliding of the work tool. The result is simple and virtuosic. In its concentration it acts like an eternally held moment of a very short time frequency.

Waschmaschine (Niels Frevert) is in effect a light sophisticated work of a flower and /or crystal mandala. By, I startet a joke (Bee Gees), it is superimposed by a floral ornament. By reassembling the same motif, completely different images and associations arise. The direction of movement of the viewer is not just vertical, but also directs itself into the depth of the image layer after layer. One follows the pull of the image, the floral patterns and emblematic forms show themselves new in different colours, size and sets as with, I’m not sorry...(Morrissey). 

By, Allah, they seem compressed and in a conflicting movement. The exterior seems hindered by the red circular forms and the resulting tension by the blue ornament in the circle is intensified. The form of Odradek in I’m not sorry...(Morrissey), dances wildly and flickers about the format in both directions.

Odradek according to the narrative of Franz Kafka, „extraordinarily mobile and uncatchable“. His laugh, „ is just a laugh, as one produces without lungs. It sounds a bit like the rustling in fallen leaves“. (Odradek is a character from Franz Kafkas(1883 - 1924) short story, The Cares of a Family Man, taken from the published in his lifetime volume, A Country Doctor (1919). 

By, middle of life, the patterns quickly  rise in a blaze then disappear again. The four white ornaments in the foreground form a bright flashing barrier, which dazzles and curiosity stirs something that is vehemently concealed behind. In the works, In der Wirklichkeit  (Blumfeld), and Step into my office, Baby (Belle & Sebastian), the subsurface becomes visible through transparent priming. The subsurface seems like a naked skin and the print upon it appears like a transparent fabric. When printing  the colour is blocked within the border of the artwork and therefore sharply contoured. Streaks and thick patches are visible. It becomes haptic and reminiscent of mud or  blood as in the painting, Ornamental Jeff Koons. 

Something presses as a fine net in an emblematic constellation up to the surface of the canvas of Ornamental Jeff Koons.

Like a deep memory of an ancient culture that has disappeared from the collective consciousness.

In changing and recombining motifs by placing and superimposing, an old fixed order is given a new weight and transformed. Through the space the colour materially occupies on the canvas, the artist occupies the space tangibly and thus creates an annexation of the space in the sense of the reinterpretation.They, the pictures, are not graspable, more like a multi voiced choir, each with a song title, leaving something of an impenetrable seriousness behind, and then condense gracefully into a gesture of continuous dance.

Very sexy.

Melusine Eichhorn, artist, Hamburg