Un voyage en Mer du Nord ( A trip to the North Sea)

1997 - Photography (Photography)

100,5 x 80,5 cm each

Jochen Lempert

---

A Trip to the North Sea is composed of 6 parts. The images show a rough sea, with huge waves. The waves foam, swell and collapse. The large size of the images, like posters, engulf the spectator’s body, as if captured by the wave which becomes sonorous in its surge, rolling from one image to the other. The clear horizon traces a line, a continuity between each image. The waves are rendered like an all over. Their massiveness accentuates the sculptural aspect of the subject. In the printing process, the artist has recomposed the image, aligning the horizon so all aspects coincide. The process remains simple and contributes to the construction of a mental and archetypal image. The vision Lempert proposes is that of an intact and virgin world. All his work has an ephemeral, ungraspable, touching feel.

---

Trained as a biologist, Lempert’s subjects are nature and its inhabitants while also being very influenced by the art of his time: seriality, archiving, abstraction, all-over painting. His approach to reality is empirical. At all times one is aware of his wonder and profound amazement with the world. He records traces, the natural geometries of the world, and thus defines his place between photography, drawing, abstraction and the object. His work in subtle. This is not to do with the definition of his images, but on the contrary with their absence of clarity, the choice made between the reality of the shot and the work in the lab. A double process occurs: what is captured and becoming in the presumed images is modified by the printing. There is some sort of loss, an incomplete image. The materiality of the paper plays a role in this approximate definition introducing a poor patina, entertaining the attitude of unlearning and starting again. Therefore the question can be posed differently: making visible something that is escaping, decomposing and going elsewhere. Jochen Lempert was born in Moers, Germany, in 1958. he lives and works in Hamburg.

---

Colors:

---

• horizon.n.01
• pure.s.04
• wave.n.01
• archetypal.s.01
• ephemeral.s.01
• continuity.n.03
• german photographers