from: Patterns in Design, Art, and Architektur

Annette Tietenberg

„Is it a flag or is it a painting?“ The red, white and blue stars and stripes, which the american artist Jasper Johns applied to the canvas in enkaustik-technique in the 1950s, triggered an art-philosophical debate on the complicated relationship of model and depiction, of image and object, which still has not been concluded. It was particularly vexing that it was impossible to decide whether the painted flag was an abstract or a representational image. Jochen Twelker’s images demonstrate that posing this question can have ist rewards even today. What at first seems like a cautiously arranged collection of stripes, squares, and floral patterns, reveals itself on closer inspection as the partially enlarged depiction of a group of people who are all wearing patterned t-shirts and shirts. Or as a tunnel vision into a wardrobe. Or as a surprise meeting with a cheap goods table, on which the most diverse kinds of material abound. Or as a view of praying muslims, who have donned soccer jerseys. Jochen Twelker makes possible the impossible: his style of painting has flat fields and contours, is abstract and representational, popular and self-reflexive, serious and humourous, all at the same time.