›What do you say?‹ 26/11/2022—21/01/2023

• Romans + Romans

Constance 26/11/2022—21/01/2023

It seems to have been a warm June day when the photos for the title image ›What are you saying?‹ were taken at the Fusion Festival. The people are wearing short casual clothes, appear to be in a cheerful mood and gather in small groups. The unusually elongated landscape format of this work measures just over five meters and yet, with its fifty centimeters height, takes up the entire wall. The work looks like a snapshot, a spontaneous snapshot of the kind we all take when traveling so that we can look back and remember the experience.

At the centre of the work, which consists of three canvases, the viewer sees a young woman who has her gaze fixed on the floor, holds both hands to her ears and appears to be talking on the phone. “What are you saying?” “I can’t hear you, it’s so loud here!”

These or similar words could have been used by the person depicted at the moment when Nina and Torsten Römer pressed the shutter button to capture the scene photographically.

The artist duo Römer + Römer create a shimmering, charged atmosphere with the depiction of this snapshot, so that the euphoria of the festival-goers can be felt. None of the people depicted in the picture make contact with the viewer, so that they can be observed and classified undisturbed in their naive actions. A deliberate voyeurism, through which the recipient is given the opportunity to mentally transport themselves to the scene of the event and become part of the celebrating crowd.

Always on the lookout for new motifs to capture with their cameras and then put on canvas, Nina and Torsten Römer travel the world, visit festivals and repeatedly capture temporary communities. They see their travels as a source of inspiration and social expeditions from which they draw the ideas for their visual worlds.

The motifs of the works by Römer + Römer are based on digital photographs, which they translate into painting and thus back into the analogue medium. The density of the small and fine colour dots, which immediately reminds us of 19th century impressionism and pointillism, oscillates here between the individual point or pixel becoming autonomous on the one hand and the interaction to form a recognizable motif on the other. The representation of light plays an important role here, as can be seen directly in the selection of works in this exhibition: dark backgrounds convey the mood of a nighttime shot, while the artificial light is represented via the direct colour contrast and allows the canvas works to literally glow from within.

Shimmering dots of color come together to form something recognizable, uniting in direct juxtaposition of pixel-like overlays of color. Stepping forward and back in front of the picture creates new moments of perception. Directly in front of the canvas we become aware of the materiality of the colors, while from a distance a large, shimmering overall image emerges.

Nina and Torsten Römer both studied under AR Penck at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, among others, and have been an inseparable couple in life and in their artistic work since 1998. All of their works are created through meticulous work and collaborative work. We are delighted to usher in the anniversary year 2023 with this exhibition in Konstanz, in which the 25-year collaboration of the artist couple Römer + Römer will be celebrated.