Klaus-Martin TrederYES–WHAT

Pictures – Objects – Posters – Klaus-Martin Treder (*1961) calls one series of his acrylic paintings “Orientierungsverlust und Ästhetik” (disorientation and aesthetics). His œuvre, by contrast, is structured into three clearly distinguishable formats, so that loss of orientation may be understood rather as the motif of the works than as the operative basis of their making. First there are the paintings and works on paper gathered as “pictures” into series and groups of works, then the “objects” and furthermore the “posters.” His work is full of self-referential and externally referential technical and discursive allusions. By freely combining the individual steps of production, the artist uses montage to bring skins of paint, slender cascades of drips or even clumsy garlands together with dripped and poured grounds of colour. Pictorial elements protrude precariously from the surface, project or hang freely beyond its boundaries, only to be set gently in motion by a draught of air or to threaten to fall off even when handled with the greatest sensitivity. This underlines the object character that painted pictures inevitably possess and at the same time raises the question of the space in which a picture presents itself as a picture and can be grasped as such. The question of the effect and the meaning of pictures is further sharpened by the elements applied to the picture surface – a motley arsenal of things familiar from everyday life: sweets and confectionery, lipstick and shampoo, coffee beans and ties, asthma sprays and tubes of paint, even head and body hair. What is more, the irrepressible colourfulness catches the eye, appearing neither expressive nor formalist. In the conceptual materialisation of paint straight from the tube – as a “ready made,” as it were! – painting is here redefined in its ontological status as an institution of art. In its design the book follows a concept of the artist’s: every second printed sheet is wrapped in a four-page section of a different colour but left unprinted, thus inserting a kind of contemplative “pause.” In this way the volume is given the true delight of the art of the book, namely holding in one’s hands something to leaf through, to move and to pause over.