Simulacrum

In his solo exhibition Simulacrum1, Janosch Jauch (b. 1985, lives and works in Düsseldorf)interrogates the iterative process of his artistic practice. Akin to an experimental configuration,kinetic shadows and forms are projected onto the walls. The constant motion of everything in the space, as in the world, refuses to be pinned down and is open to interpretation. Evoking a phantasmagorical spatial experience, Simulacrum documents the present to reveal what underpins our world in the form of a stylized garden. The world only becomes comprehensible when we look behind its façade, and recreating objects allows us to understand their true function.2 Analogously, staged backdrops feature biological and industrialized goods – in a sense found and made – as the starting point of the visual artistic process. The compact scenes modulate the light like inorganic plants that change their appearance day and night depending on the position of the sun. Almost like a mirage, they move through space and create an endless flood of moving images. The creative process is inherent in the work because the point of interrogation is also the medium. The life-giving power of light is a primordial phenomenon and cosmological aesthetic that embodies the doctrine of the 'adorned order' of nature. Photographs that have been edited digitally or by hand are enlarged as gelatin silver prints on canvas. They are markers of an aesthetic expedition and reference points that simultaneously anchor the results of our perception. The process becomes an image, a picture and a multifaceted installation. Through photography, Jauch imitates and documents the arranged objects, which are then rendered in two dimensions via a simulation of reality and imagination. Combining different formats breaks the rigid boundaries of subject, painting and photography to create visual architectures. His work invokes perception as a universal form of representation that challenges the viewer's visual memory. Also immanent in Jauch’s explorations is the putative dualism between nature vs. culture. By focusing on the visual, he shows that everything is in a constant state of reinvention. What was originally there and what became of it through artistic intervention becomes a Simulacrum, the expression of a hyperreality. 1 (simulo Latin for image, likeness, or mirage | simul Latin for similar, same) means a real or imagined object that resembles another object or person. 2 Roland Barthes: Die strukturalistische Tätigkeit