“Up to now, painting was like photography in color. But color was always employed as a means to describe something. Abstract art is the premise of a liberation from the old pictorial formula. A genuinely new form of painting will emerge the day we understand that color has a life of its own, that the endless combinations of colors bear poetry and a poetic language way more expressive than the older forms. This mysterious language has to do with vibrations, the very life of a color. In this domain, new possibilities are infinite.” - Sonia Delaunay, 1949
The pictures in Jessica Backhaus’ new series Cut-Outs are created by using the simplest means and they reduce photography to its basic elements: light and shadow, shape and color.
In her last publication A Trilogy (Kehrer, 2017), Jessica Backhaus has taken
a path into abstraction, which is consistently continued here - with very analog, photographic methods. Cut out transparent paper reacts to the heat of intense sunlight, deforms, rises, and casts shadows. The photographer who arranged and staged these compositions becomes an astonished observer of events on which she has only limited influence, the documentarist of a visual experimental arrangement, a poetic choreography of intense colors in the sunlight.
Author: Katharina Scriba
Artist: Jessica Backhaus
Publisher: Kehrer Verlag, Heidelberg
Design: Hannah Feldmeier and Jessica Backhaus
Softcover with color edging: 22,2 x 31,1 cm, 128 pages, 50 color ills., English, 2021
