06/18/88 - 07/24/88
"the photo-booklets that are the reason for this exhibition will be shown as provisional booklets containing original photos in transparent covers and as three printed and published booklets - indicating a series. these are not to be viewed as catalogues with photo illustrations, but as the valid form of publication. i have been thematising the connection between two photos for 15 years, using the fundamental condition of a book - in which two pages are always visible - as the point of departure, and i identify the page with the photo. i refer this practice each time to superficial theorems, in earlier times to the assertion of a film-editing model, the smallest unit in film (thematising the movement between two photos), later to that of the ornament, not to be confused with decoration or embellishment or reduced to rapport, but made pointed, in the sense of Semper, to the origin of the ornament, the seam. the ornament is the trace of a criminal movement, which will lead, as a model, the murderer back to the crime
having the crime in mind he paced to the horse, rode to her, struck her with a sword, time passed the corpse grew tender.
- drastic event - and later to the scene of the crime, a movement tending to be circular with a cut. linking two photos has shown itself to be purely ornamental work. the ornament is not a crime, but the trace helping to solve the crime. our crime is no longer pure as a model, but dispersed, atomised, omnipresent, perhaps to be called horror. the drawings express this theoretical circling and the circling of the explorer. the system is the result and the exhibition an indication of it. the individual drawings are results or sketches as results and the sketches point to painting, sculpture, photography. all in all, i like to say that drawings are sketches for photography. a good drawing contains the holes through which the viewer will fall. those exhibited now are from the period of october 1986 to the present. one and a half years certainly imply restriction. i would like to communicate the richness in this restriction."
Gerald Domenig, June 1988
Gerald Domenig, born in 1953 in Villach/Austria, lives in Frankfurt since 1974.