Codification of Intimacy

Each drawing in the Codification of intimacy is based on a chapter, a passage or a key word that Voigt has chosen to distill from Niklas Luhmann's Love as Passion (1982). Voigt began her drawings by first marking those passages in the text that triggered intuitive associations. She then drew free-form shapes suggested by the literary content and, in turn cut out the outlined shapes, gilded them, and replaced them into their original positions on the large paper sheets. The artist then continued to re-work each drawing, using watercolors, pastels and oil crayons. Voigt also added her own hand-written "notations" that she integrally interpolated into the field of each drawing. These hand-written notation denote spatial and temporal points, or parameters. Terms like “Speed of Rotation," "Direction," "Egomotion," or "Now" locate, in space, time and even character, not only the shapes the artist has imagined but also these shapes' relationships and relative positioning.

The starting point of each Voigt drawing - here, the language of Luhmann's text - is fixed, but each drawing's development is intentionally unprescribed, fluid and open. The gilded areas in Voigt's drawings - gold, of course, being symbolic of the sacred and the divine in early Western (Christian) art - indicate the original shapes, or essential core, that emerge for Voigt as she begins her drawing and notation process. The shimmering materiality of the gold leaps out from a drawings's overall composition, much of the drawing otherwise spatially empty and schematic. The drawings, in their "painterliness" are reminiscent of the work of the Modernist painters Wassiliy Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The presence of strong painterly elements also reflects the artist's fascination with East Asian art: with, more particularly, the lively coloration, penchant for gilded surfaces and stylized linear depiction found in the erotic paintings and colored woodcuts of the Japanese Edo period (17th-19th century).

Texts: Lisa Sintermann, Jorinde Voigt