Johannes Kersting
In his paintings, photographs and installations, Johannes Kersting explores the psychological and cultural implications of images of space and landscape. His work focuses on the interplay between reality and imagination.
Kersting uses staging and construction schemes from classical painting, cinema and video games to reveal the narrative and effective mechanisms of popular visual worlds.
In his analysis of these visual worlds, Kersting traces our social understanding of landscape in particular. This symbolic projection surface can be understood equally as mere fiction, an environment to be exploited, a threatening elemental force, or even a quasi-utopian place of symbiotic coexistence between humans and nature. In the depiction of certain places, our attitude towards the world and our narrative of modern coexistence always become palpable.
Kersting works with photography, AI-supported imaging, and classic digital and analogue tools to extract specific formulations from the flood of images and translate them into painting. Inspired by the photographic tradition of New Topographics, he often works serially in his painting and is interested in the contrast between chance and construction, both in the painting process and in the motifs depicted.
Experiencing spaces and places altered by human hands in images creates moments of pathos, beauty and sublimity, but also melancholy, a feeling of loss, loneliness and decay. For Kersting, these intensifying impressions are welcome qualities of image-making, revealing the layers of meaning in the visibility of landscape and ways of viewing it.
(From ‘Backstage Realities’, 2022)
(Photo © Magdalena Abele)
