Reality, Color Memory and Painting
Claudia Desgranges talks to Gisela Clement
 
Clement: A lot has been said and written about your work already. People repeatedly point out connections with great painters of the last century; Albers, Rothko and Graubner are names that continually come up. How do you see these relationships, or are they mere acquaintances?
Desgranges: I think it is difficult to classify my works. Of course, I work before a backdrop and consciousness of the history of painting. The Abstract Modern, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, and Minimalism have all influenced me. At the same time, it is my goal to attain a freedom in painting that goes beyond conventions and initiates new ways of viewing.
Clement: So our ways of looking need to change in order to get a grip on the flood of impressions, something you refer to as the tsunami of pictures?
Desgranges: Yes, we are subjected to so many kinds of media and everything just gets faster, and many things are simultaneous. I am reacting to this with the slow medium of painting.
Clement: Your occupation with the phenomenon of the accelerated world, the question as to what impressions are reflected in painting, caused you to work with the medium of film in 2009. For more than twenty years you have ended each workday by brushing out your paintbrush in a diary. For your exhibition at the Museum Burg Wissem, pages were photographed from three color diaries that were especially significant with respect to your biography. These photos were shown as slide projections, albeit in different time loops, next to, parallel and equal to a film that you had made over the course of four months.
Degranges: By showing the film and pictures next to each other, you can see how memories and impressions flow into my painting. Real appearances find their expressions in abstract form in the pictures. The film represents the depot in my head I create from.
Clement: In our project Cross–Fadings you went yet a step further. Here you spliced film and photographs of your paintings together.
Desgranges: I filmed for three months, selecting pictures from my last diary. The memory of reality, of color and of painting are crossfaded with one another. It is no longer possible to separate them.
Clement: For the second phase of the project on Irmintrudisstraße Street, you painted the aluminum ledge of the garage and switched and colored several pavement slabs from the garage entry. How do these two interventions fit together?
Desgranges: Opposites play a central role in all my works. Here it is the lightness of the strip of aluminum and the heaviness of the concrete slabs. I wish to bring together various levels of perception, and bring various materials together. The goal to not to become absorbed by a picture. The eye should wander around. The color harmony of the pavement slabs shows up again in the painting on the aluminum ledge, connecting these works. The viewer stands before a multipart picture, a challenge to a kind of visual multitasking.
Clement: The work on the aluminum — you refer to these works as “time strips” — reminds us of a film scene where a train races by. In connection with the third project phase on Adolfstraße Street as well, the window strip also reminds us of a film sequence. Seen from this angle, this work is also a time sequence, but one that reveals a different speed.
Desgranges: Yes, really, the band of windows with its division into frames reminds us of a celluloid strip. The stairwell with its interior lighting is then sort of a projector and the street space is the projection space. A stationary time strip is certainly the intention here, almost a constructive approach, which is broken up again, however, in its vehement colorfulness and by the scattered light.
Clement: Is this then a fade–in and fade–out of art into daily life in the old part of the city at night?
Desgranges: Yes, here the chance passerby, the biker or driver, is the recipient, at any rate someone who is moving and then perhaps halts for a minute to ponder and then continues on his way. At the same time, because the stairwell gets used, there is repeatedly a visible movement in the picture, or respectively, behind the picture. This random choreography is part of my concept.
Clement: I liked this especially. The fact that you, over the course of our projects — after Detlef Beer’s pictures for and in empty apartments, after Friedhelm Falke’s wall paintings in apartments and stairwells, and after Martin Noël’s interventions in the outside spaces of our grounds — have come with your overlayings, which somehow dematerialize color, to create a further level of confrontation between painting and reality.