Jochen Mühlenbrink: Afterimage

Rolls of adhesive tape are casually spread across a table in the exhbition space as if it were the most normal thing. Light falls on canvases set aside, the latticed gallery window casts a diamond pattern across them. The sun continues its journey and the image starts to come undone: reality moves ahead, the earth turns, and Mühlenbrink’s empty canvases suddenly reveal themselves as a bluff.
With the exhibition “Afterimage” Jochen Mühlenbrink further expands the radius of his trompe-l’œil style. The surfaces of the pictures go beyond the dimensions of common painting supports. He not only works on canvas and paper: wood and bronze play a part as well and mark a shift away from the limits of two dimensions. The material takes the stage and instead of depicting a narrative in painterly form, it begins to represent itself.
An “Afterimage” means a sensual impression that lasts once the immediate perceptive stimulus has passed. In order to reach the afterimage stage something needs to have come to an end, time must pass and what was there to be seen must have vanished. Mühlenbrink is not playing tricks on the viewers, and yet all there is to see is an illusion. Image and afterimage engage in an argument, they mutually question each other about their truthfulness. Perception is not only subject to the exposure to light, but also to the state of things.