Jörg Sasse
Monday, 20 February 2012
Work from his oeuvre.
“‘I would never place a work in the public domain that I myself couldn’t stand in front of and be amazed.’ Jörg Sasse finds nothing more dubious than straightforward answers as, to his mind, this flies in the face of the fact that reality is far more complex and enigmatic. Thus, he rejects there being any such thing as definitive truths. And if there were, then he would certainly not trust them. Generally speaking, Jörg Sasse is more interested in questions than he is in answers.
‘Did classical photography ever reproduce what was in front of the camera?’ is one of the questions that Sasse reflects on in his oeuvre. All the works collected here express doubts concerning the documentary nature of photography.
After all, strictly speaking these works are not photographs, since Sasse generates them with a PC. This is not to forget that photographs do serve as his raw materials. The photos come from family albums, flea markets, or rubbish bins. And Jörg Sasse thinks that finding is much more original than inventing. He digitalises any pictures that interest him. And in the highly complicated process that follows, the photo becomes increasingly removed from its original existence. Sasse redefines the colours and the cropped section to be used, changes the angle, deletes specific elements or adds new items. The final result is an artificial product cleansed of all material contingency, offering the illusion of reality, a picture that we can presume is a photograph.
This interplay of different levels of reality and perceptual habits is intended to illustrate the enigmatic while, at the same time, relying on the fact we will see through the illusion. To Sasse’s mind, this is not contradictory. ‘Seeing and thinking, thinking and seeing – who can keep the two apart?'” – Deutsche Borse