"Stockage 197"

Scanogramm, pigmentbased inkjet print on Canson paper

signed, titled, dated, and numbered on label verso

The scanner, on which the artist places the flowers, records the palpation in a strictly linear fashion. Proximity produces a precision of detail, while the distant disappears into an impenetrable darkness. Lens by lens and unembellished, the scanner builds up a pixel-by-pixel image of the flowers, while also revealing damage to the delicate blossoms or the first signs of the inevitable decay that lurks behind all this splendour. In Luzia Simons' work, the tulip becomes a metaphor for mobility, globalisation and intercultural identity because of its "nomadic" history.
(Luzia Simons)

With the continuously developing series Stockage, Luzia Simons became a pioneer of the scanogram technique. The Stockage (Engl.: storage) works reveal that her large-format floral still lifes are not simply a homage to Baroque painting and the reception of the vanitas motif. Instead, behind the aesthetic surface of her works, caught between photography and painting, the artist deals with central questions of identity as a socio-cultural construction and a global awareness in the mirror of cultural differences.
Because of this interface between the obvious and the cultural code, between naked image and metaphor, Simons developed her recording technique from 1995 onwards: the scanogram. With the help of this technique, Simons scans flowers and plants directly. The peculiarity of this procedure is that the gaze on the motif - unlike in photography - does not require a central point of view. Instead, the act of reproducing the visible takes place in a direct manner. Once designed to digitalize documents, the scanner has neither a lens nor a focus. It only knows juxtaposition, where proximity causes everything in the foreground to be equally bright and detailed, and everything deeper is lost in darkness without perspective.
Objectively and unadorned, the scanner builds up an image of flowers pixel by pixel, revealing not only the ideal forms of blossoming beauty but also the defects, disturbances, and incipient inexorable decay. The iconography of the flower as an artistic position that combines photographic hyperrealism and metaphorical intention thus becomes, in Luzia Simons' work, a symbol for cultural migration, intercultural exchange, and the associated subtle change of aesthetic meaning in the mirror of a global economy.
In nature, plants communicate through information networks of underground mycelium. Alluding to such natural communication processes, the latest wall tapestry Tendenz Endlos, was embroidered with ornaments in the form of lines, dots, and signs. Over three years, numerous people networked with the artist have interrelated the given botanical motifs through ever-new cross-and-transverse interventions. This progress was abstracted into a movement that connects spaces and interspaces but also points beyond the wall tapestry - in a process that tends to be endless, with the tulip scanograms as the starting point. The project is also inspired by the idea of an "infinite natural history" (Paul Klee).
(Galerie Andreas Binder)