Catalogue ›Presages‹ Jan Davidoff | Lachenmann Art

Catalogue for the solo exhibition ›Vorzeichen‹ by the artist Jan Davidoff, which took place from May 20 to June 24 , 2017 at the Lachenmann Art Gallery in Konstanz. Texts by Juliane Lachenmann, Christina Wigger, Jan Davidoff, Claus Peter Lieckfeld, Jennifer de Negri.

The wood of the installation wall that Jan Davidoff has added to the gallery space is as old as it looks, feels and smells: it is floorboards that the artist removed from his recently purchased house on Lake Ammersee during a careful restoration. At the beginning of the renovation of the old farmhouse, he embarked on an exciting journey through time: in the attic he found an old suitcase filled with old handwritten letters and photographs from the time of the First World War, which has now become part of the installation. The paper works shown were created from old documents that the artist discovered as well as new sheets of paper that were written on during the restoration, and show flying and resting birds as well as trees and tree houses. The subject of nature is not new in Jan Davidoff's work. A good two years ago, he gave our gallery space a magical atmosphere with a tree house built especially for the exhibition. Who among us has not climbed the tops of old trees as a child, sat in a tree house or at least dreamed of doing so? Our fantasies from back then seem to have matured in the current exhibition 'Presages'. The forest and the scene that the visitor enters when they pass through the old farmhouse door in the wooden wall exudes an uncertain atmosphere. The eye glides over metal and canvas works with dark, bare trees and old wood, it captures matte white on shiny black and lines of sight up to the tops of leafless natural giants. The windows are darkened, the light sources reduced, floor-to-ceiling twigs and branches rise up from a steel barrel, which, illuminated from below, cast eerie shadows on the ceiling. In the middle of the room is an old black farmhouse door on which a stone raven has taken up residence. The ear perceives the twittering of birds that seems to ignore all this, and immediately the eye discovers the sprouting of new buds, the rays of sunlight on golden branches and the gentle rippling of a stream.

In the exhibition, Jan Davidoff captures the media presence of the downfall, of the world conflagration, which can be felt everywhere these days and which, paradoxically, is surprisingly easy to live with. Inspired by Rousseau and Schiller, the artist has, however, partly created a positive worldview that recognizes the negative as a component of the good and people as beings who create the bad but still want the good. In this way, the twittering of birds, the sunbeams and the fresh buds become hopeful harbingers of something new, something different.

With ›Vorzeichen‹, Jan Davidoff challenges all of the visitor's senses, he forces the precise perception of the cycle of life, he demands the full attention of the senses. Light, smell and sound combine with the visual experience of the artist's works and the viewer's own, individual feelings that are evoked by the experience of the exhibition and that keep the viewer occupied for a long time.

On the exhibition ›Foreshadowing‹

Discover more works by Jan Davidoff