++++ Artist portraits (62): Bleda y Rosa
The search for one's own roots stands for the attempt made by people to orient themselves in the present and to find their own individual standpoint in the world. To find your own way, it may be helpful to know about the history of your own culture and to understand yourself as a part of this culture. This makes it easier because of the feeling of being culturally and historically oriented.
The Spanish artist couple, Maria Bleda and José Maria Rosa, have found a very poetic and conceptually compelling way of stimulating reflection about history and collective memory. At the Kunstverein they are showing four large-format colour photographs on which the historical places of Knossos, Kerkouane, Bulla Regia and, as a genuflection towards Frankfurt and its environs, Glauberg are depicted — four unspectacular photographs of the ruins of walls, mosaic floors and decayed interiors with Doric columns, presented in dark frames and hung so low, as if the viewer could walk right into them. These are the remains of glorious Greek, Phoenician, Roman and Celtic culture, empty of people and strangely composed in their stillness. Bleda y Rosa's reproductions differ from those of professionally made illustrated volumes. Two-thirds of the room may be in shadow, the mosaic floor can only be recognized in part or the sky takes up more than half of the photograph.
In earlier works too, they engage with the past as it is stored in the present. The series of empty football grounds, for instance, contains everything which has happened there without depicting it — the sweat, the cheers, the booing, the goals which may once have been made in the now desolate nets. The shots of battlefields, by contrast, show waving fields of wheat, meadows covered in flowers and olive groves filled with sunlight. A sign nearby provides the information that bloody wars were fought at these paradisic places, but the viewer already has an foreboding.
The pictures at the Kunstverein work in a similar way. None of the photographs is obtrusive, despite their large format. None of these places cry out, "Look here, I am an important place marking significant culture!" They are simply there, still and natural. And that is good to know.
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Markt 44, Römerberg, until 25 August. jdv