COLOGNE.- On paper, and upon it lines and strokes, then shapes and forms. Gathered from the outside, driven from the inside, catalyzed by the mind. Bringing something crucial to life through the imagination, putting it on paper, through the hand.

This is how the drawing and painting artists build narratives. Not necessarily through the extensive application of colors and tonal values, but rather focused on outline and hatching, surface and depth. They shape and deform, frame, digress or reduce, invent, fiddle or confront. They show us an individual part of the truth around us and within us.

The group exhibition ...on paper carries us through actual, direct as well as subtle, contemporary snapshots of realities manifested on paper. It takes us into microscopic worlds that sometimes map the inside and sometimes caricature the outside. Subjects were meticulously traced and then bent into their environment, sprinkled with the surreality of dreams, desires, judgments, fantasies and experiences.

Anya Belyat-Giunta's eccentric faces and figures are presented in a romantic shape. Colourful, partly blurred, enlarged or sorely alienated defragmentations of the organic and the inorganic are full of paradoxes. At first glance, lovely colors know how to veil malicious, wicked countenances. If you look deeper, you can see the layers that betray the dark and hidden underneath, or they burst out of context through their incongruity.

Barbara Lüdde draws young people who move between technological high culture and autonomous subculture, live and love, and also suffer and long in it. The subversive characters appear honest, strong and desperate at the same time and carry symbols of convention and anti-convention. Striving for identity and waiting, their gaze slides into a space outside of her own, which perludes new hopes for the seekers.

The conglomerate of archivally recorded pasts that Diederik Gerlach creates in his works seems like a reinvention of personal memories that have stuck in the memory like a dream. The images are parables that tell of 1950s travel magazines, old advertising promises and literary anecdotes, and bring them together in a paradoxically logical way.

Johannes Spehr deals with our world in a political or confrontational manner and, through his drawings and installations, throws us in front of completely new ones that he has created. "Here's a suggestion for you." They seem to want to tell us. It does not matter whether we understand it or not. The main thing is that the suggestion is there, confuses us, then fascinates us and finally does not let us go.

Sarah Minutillo's works invite us to empathize with the fragility of human existence.
In her drawings, she reproduces documents or photographs in which she recognizes ambiguous or aesthetic meaning, and thus an ambivalent potential. The images are regarded as words with semantic value that carry visually through the unspeakable. The painting technique, sometimes exaggerated, sometimes scattered, underlines the past of the motifs.

Veronika Holcovà's works on paper have a life of their own, as ornamental manifestations of her subconscious. Structures and networks that appear to have grown organically produce creatures and patterns that stand alone or are cumulatively woven into one another. The colorful drawings are independent explorations of her work, ciphers of her deepest and most private self.

Nschotschi Haslinger's drawings are not surreal illustrations full of symbols. On the contrary. The images are settings in which we can observe the residents doing strange, ritual, mysterious things with natural immanence. It's like opening a door and bursting into a terrarium where strange, yet sympathetic things are happening.

The notes on paper are contemporary witnesses that can help us to deal with ourselves. They offer us suggestions on how to capture our momentum.

Real and surreal constructions as well as traces and impressions of the body, of living together, of eroticism, of power, flow into the game that encloses all these components. They stream into a narrow passage of a free outline of the articulated areas and scenarios.'

It is true that an explanation cannot always be found for what is there and what the eye takes in, let alone what the mind does with it. But one thing is certain: the drawings are about details. About twists and turns, storm and urge, about human and non-human existence.

--Elisa Mosch, 2022