In this context Sabine Straßburger employs ever new experimental arrangements to situate within the picture the question as to why the illusion. within our perception are so steadfast and the fear of a terrain which knows no final answers is so large. Moving along this track, her painting formulates an ongoing criticism of the technical images which can claim for themselves the capability of deceiving the observer with a supposedly high content of truth. For in spite of knowledge about the possibility of manipulating electronically created pictures, that which is seen is understood to be real – all-powerful fantasies of an omnipresence which consists only of pixels „Photograph has destroyed the likeness, „observes Elias Canetti in his notes concerning „The Province of the Human“, yet painting has in no way abandoned the Vision of the artistic equivalent of the real.
Painting refuses to be an easily handled system of images, negates the comprehensibility of the world through images and thereby constructs an imaginary space beyond the coded systems which define our commonplace world of merchandise, the exchange of information, Gazing at the pictures of Sabine Straßburger, the observer is thrown back onto his own resources. The pictures send the observer onto a never-ending journey of clashes and contradictions – a journey which knows the goal of no harbor, for „1“ certainly always means „Another“; there is no such thing as a congruent image, a fixed image, an absolute identity.
What is special about the pictures of Sabine Straßburger is that they succeed in integrating signs of discursive language into the painted image without operating on the surface of excitingly staged disparities, in other words without grabbing after effects which quickly evaporate.
Upon a square picture surface, there appears a square which is sharply delineated against the gray surroundings – like a picture segment in which painting occurs. In yellowish colors the painted surface scintillates, mysterious phenomena appear like a will-o‘-the wisp, like a view into the hidden world of a stony crater. The many-voiced language of painting is framed by gray theory. On the borders of the picture the artist has set adjustment marks which in multi-colored offset printing assure that the various printing plates are precisely synchronized with each other. The adjusted illusion of the precise picture, the piercingly sharp depiction of reality – a mode of viewing which the artist claims for her picture through this contrecoup of her painting
With her pictures Sabine Straßburger formulates compositions of painting We see sequences of signs in their play of meaning. Following the principles of poetic construction, the signs become more dense, allow space in which our thoughts can dance the wild dance of concrete association – a space of freedom in which, without the tightly constricting garment of subject, predicate and object the world is seen without grammatical reading-glasses.
In diptychs, diverse color surfaces and various signs are contrasted with each other. There arc brackets, with which we normally indicate parentheses in sentence constructions or add subsidiary meanings without wishing to interrupt the flow of speech. When these brackets are cast into the flow of painting, they open up thought spaces or dose and consolidate a space which must remain empty. We encounter the idea of the circle, indicated by lines, cut mnto segments and distributed over several picture Formats – the idea of the circle as an absolute form is presented as a thought construction which must be carried out in our head and which is not delivered free of charge. Homogeneous pictures, archetvpal images of harmony – these are illusions which are real solely as constructs of ideas, as images of thought.
In a series of pictures die artist employs those protective coverings which arc turned up over the corners of frames to protect them from damage. On the one hand these forms arc actually utilized in serially arranged sequences of pictures, and on the other hand the form appears as a surface left blank, a space which painting does not fill. The district of painting is here imagined to be protected – but also set in brackets, demarcated from the surrounding space, marked off as artistic terrain.
These brackets would ha-ve to be nullified if reality were to Validate Antonin Artaud’s dream that an exhibition must be not only an event in art history but in history itself. But in point of fact we see that our perception of the world shatters into a multiplicity of moments. Every code develops its own image of the world.