What comes to mind today when we think of the quintessential image, beyond individual pictures? For countless centuries, even millennia, the first thing we would have thought of was the medium of painting, from the stony surface of cave paintings to the canvases displayed in museums, as well as other equally venerable art forms. We also had it in our consciousness, as a mental image that unfolded in our imaginations. It was always something directly accessible: it could be effortlessly grasped and seamlessly integrated into the mind’s eye, no extra tools necessary.

Then came a break. All of a sudden, a screen stepped between us and all the images that currently form the bulk of our day-to-day engagement with the medium. It is a shift that has yet to be ratified or fully understood, prompting us to wonder what can now be considered an archetypal image in today’s context. Will our imaginations remain tied to tradition, just as our needs continue to follow the same patterns and priorities established in the primordial era of human history? Or will we adapt our experiences entirely to the confines of the screen? Or will we opt for even more diversification, sorting ourselves according to personal preference, external influence, or group affiliation?

Bernhard Holaschke’s work engages directly with these questions. His artworks come to life in both digital and analogue formats, manifesting not only within the confines of the screen, that membrane that separates us from virtual representations, but also physically on the surface of the canvas, where even the most finely glazed brushstroke juts out from the overall surface. Here, the virtual image finds a home beyond the screen, while its analogue counterpart intrudes on our tangible reality, like a sculptural relief that coexists with us in our physical space.

These two phenomena are intimately linked, not only because they originate in the creative mind of a single artist—and thus spring from the same visual imagination—but also because Holaschke weaves painterly elements from his own body of work into his virtual pieces. Equally intrinsic to his analogue artistic output are virtual entities, some of which quote from his own digital production process. Through these fragments, analogue and digital production are entwined, breathing life into a body of work whose vital tensions arise from the interplay of interconnected references. What we perceive within it is inherently medial in nature; there is a distinct quality of mediality that we can palpably feel—the filters, the distances, but also the intimacy.

The screen is not a painting ground; it is not the starting point from which a picture naturally accumulates through successive outward layers to create an illusion of space in the opposite direction. Instead, both its origins and functions are standardised, emitting light from within produced by its delicate electrical supply. In stark contrast to traditional works of art, which typically share the same physical spaces and external light sources with us, the screen is self-sufficient and requires no such external illumination.

If applying paint to canvas even partially means obscuring it, then any shaping of the world within the confines of the screen reinforces this distancing, pushing the images further away from us. Where we once felt the prospect of internalisation, we now perceive boundaries; in place of physical coexistence, a hollowing-out of the concrete.

Yet this is only one facet of all that could be said. The screen also doubles as an exhibition. After all, its original function is to arrange content for us with an efficiency that painting could never hope to achieve. It is our main instrument, ubiquitous to such an extent that we may choose to accept its distinct and standardised mediality, however conspicuous, and thus disregard its explicit paradigm. In contrast, the canvas, or any other painting ground, bears an abundance of traces, whose individuality demands special examination. In this sense, screen images are more like pictograms. Their communication is all the more reliable because their mediality is general rather than specific in nature. The absence of specific traces does nothing to diminish the directness of their message.

As we stand on the cusp of a paradigm shift in the realm of images, Holaschke highlights several key distinctions: the choice of the virtual medium promotes accessibility and standardisation, but it also implies a departure from that personally invested materiality whose decelerated construction offers insights into individual creative processes. The two alternatives are rarely presented with such immediacy; to encounter such a profound exploration of their potential is rarer still.

by Tobias Kämpf, published in “Bernhard Holaschke - This Is All I Could Do”, Distanz Verlag, 2024, ISBN978-3-95476-624-6

https://www.distanz.de/bernhard-holaschke/this-is-all-i-could-do

The first act of a homo sapiens lies far in the past. Impossible to identify the exact point in time by archaeologists or anthropologists through relicts or reconstruction.
However, as the acting and emotions became subject to materialistic and conceptualist forming, the latter scientist are able to describe possible paths homo sapiens took over time with regard to several dimensions of existence.

Bernhard Holaschke examines with his art the relationship of the findings of the former described scientists with the avantgarde and contemporary making of these psychological / physical ideas and relicts.
Evoking emotions depends on perceptional matters. As the emotional constitution of the homo sapiens did not quite change over time due to the slow process of physical evolution in the human case, the spiritual and mind creations changed immensely.
The artist discloses the relationship between relicts of the path of history to their modern counterparts. These relicts represent symbols or witnesses of perceptions of their respective times.

How much trust should we base on our perception? So the symbols changed but the emotions stayed the same? The artist does not answer these questions but unveils the relationship by confrontation and composition. His work evokes emotions with a particular weight on fear, laughter, irritation and surprise

by AP. for the website 2020

The Ace Signs, or how
to put a Christmas tree on the
spin cycle

In 1973 the Italian author Italo Calvino published a novella titled Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies) in which a tarot card game from the mid-fifteenth century takes the leadi ng role. The guests of the titular castle have lost their language under mysterious circumstances. Nevertheless, they lay cards to find a way to tel l of their adventures. They spin tales out of the combinations, motifs, and symbols for which there are—as per the nature of the game—various possible arrangements and interpretations.

Bernhard Holaschke’s paper works can be treated similarly—partly because elements from tarot such as cups and swords can actually be found in them. Yet the artist mixes them up against the rules of color theory and leaves them entirely devoid of the usual, miniature drawings. They are hardly necessary, since the collages also work as a “machine for constructing stories” just as they are.1 Signs and objects clash on ink backgrounds, some of which are elaborated with virtuosity, while others display a calculated refusal. These are as incompatible as, say, Xtina and Britney, Pepsi and Coca-Cola—or else they rub against each other, such that their effects awkwardly linger, they stick. Eventually you cease to be sure whether there isn’t in fact something holding them together: Christmas tree and washing machine, for example, sword and broom, spade and chandelier. Such pairings might bring to mind Georges Bataille and the way he presented the “disproportion” in his magazine Documents, and—as Georges Didi-Huberman puts it—how he connects an astounding network of references, implicit or explosive contact, true or false similarities, true or false dissimilarities.

Holaschke prefers to juggle implicitly and explosively with baroque vanitas motifs and their contemporary counterparts, with apples and grapes, playing cards, dice, cigarettes, luxury goods. He will often have watches melt in a Dalíesque manner. Not just any watches, however, since it is never simply any old objects with him—each has at least one story, if not hundreds. Sometimes it is a Rolex, sometimes a Casio F-91W, the first and, today, still the cheapest digital watch, worn even by Bin Laden. Does he hear time ticking? Does he see it rushing by like all those jets and racing cars? “A clock has always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object”—the words W.G. Sebald put in Austerlitz’s mouth in the eponymous book.3 Holaschke seems to be of a similar opinion. His play with transience is one full of breaks and twists, though he does not seem to be intimidated by them. Sometimes it is the titles that relativize, ironize, raise everything to another level, or conversely take
things down a notch.

Sebald is also someone who could be brought in as a reference for his system of bricolage, his handling of found visual material of all kinds and
qualities. Even for his preference for certain subjects. Eyes, for example, the conspicuously large ones of wild animals, owls and monkeys4—to which Holaschke apparently responds with the rear lights of the Nissan GT-R Liberty Walk, the eyes of Nefertiti, Sailor Moon, or even just with watercolor smeared on paper.

Holaschke arranges the reference points in his collages like fruits in a seventeenth-century still life—or is it rather a meme of one? Not all of them can or need to be picked out. It could well be that one apple or another tastes sourer than it looks.

1 In his note on the
novel, Calvino writes “I
realized the tarots were a
machine for constructing
stories.” See Italo
Calvino, The Castle of
Crossed Destinies,
trans. William Weaver,
New York 1977 [1973],
p. 126.
2 Translation from
Georges Didi-Huberman.
Formlose Ähnlichkeit
oder die Fröhliche Wissenschaft
des Visuellen
nach Georges Bataille
(Munich: Fink Wilhelm,
2010), p. 26.
3 W. G. Sebald,
Austerlitz,
trans. Anthea Bell,
New York 2001, p. 107.
4 Ibid. p. 4.

by Beate Scheder, published in “Bernhard Holaschke - Do You Believe in Gods”, Distanz Verlag, 2021, ISBN978-3-95476-414-3

https://www.distanz.de/bernhard-holaschke/do-you-believe-in-gods