Claudia Rogge: Warp and Weft

When one views the new series of pictures by Claudia Rogge attentively, one is astounded by the precision, incisiveness, and subtlety of her craft. In an intelligent way, her new works examine the aesthetic dimensions and sociological assumptions about the design, as well as its essence and implication.

Today, we grasp hell better than any golden age. Our crises tend to exacerbate themselves more than ever, and to have a domino effect on the social fabric. In this context, the identification and the creation of patterns attain deep socio-anthropological significance, since, in a certain way, they serve to impart structural and systemic order to a world.

The idea that a pattern is a kind of cultural artifact, which has a great effect and a large influence on collective psychology and the conceptions of aesthetics, is one of the argumentative reasons for Rogge’s photographic work. The cultural being does not exist outside of the pattern. We spend our life producing and reproducing patterns, whether they are material or immaterial. Textiles appear as factual and incontrovertible proof of these processes of reproduction, which are rooted in nature and its continually recurring cycles.

Text by Andrés Isaac Santana  

Image: Claudia Rogge, Purple Weapon, Lambda auf Alu-Dibond, 2022, 90 x 120 cm, © the artist and GALERIE VOSS

Claudia Rogge stamps the skin of her models like a kind of tattoo, so that the iterative materials and ornaments on the skin dissolve the categorical boundaries and conclude in a performance of intersections and reproductions. The repetition of the poses and the serial elements activate the mechanisms of an enormous choreography. Claudia Rogge’s approach consists of selecting and isolating a motif, which is then repeated within a potentially endless ensemble. In this way, the picture produces an inner movement, which ultimately seems distinctly unsettling. This rhythm allows conceptual speculations to thrive, strengthening the value of these works.

Claudia Rogge’s art is clearly an exercise in manipulation/replication. She works based on seduction and simulation; she stages a visual, strongly appealing narrative, which enjoys exaggerating the beautiful while, at the same time, keeping clearly in mind that beauty is intrinsically a hermeneutic trap. Therefore, it is the case that her concerns transcend the threshold of what is depicted in favor of discursive replication. The chain that is being woven in these new works of the artist, results out of the study and observation of the grammar of the patterns, which are generated out of the accumulation of physical and textile elements.

It becomes apparent, that a very complex relationship exists between the human body and the clothing. The latter is a kind of second skin, an entity that reveals much about the sexual, cultural, and ethnic identity of the subject.

The stigma of violence is pervasive in the contemporary world and is often mobilized by the organs of the state itself. This violence is not just expressed through persecution, repression, and distrust, but also through homogenization and the acknowledgement of conforming acts: each one resembles the next.

Claudia Rogge’s photographic narrative represents a metonymic exercise, which emphasizes adjacencies and semantic shifts. Metonymy implies precisely “a semantic alteration, that consists in giving an object the name of another, that is to say, to refer to an object with the name of another object or another thing.”

In this case, the artist uses photography in order to enumerate a social phenomenon. Her works become the poetic fulfillment of a collective trauma as well as an insight into homogenization, and they are in the position of establishing an indisputable series of meanings and polyhedric interpretations. Therefore, it is perhaps not digressive to invoke the concept or the term of “commissure” introduced by Kristine Stiles, when it comes to understanding the connections or possible links between the repertoire of images by this artist and the conflict-ridden social order, which surface as an attesting whisper in the hermeneutic fabric of her work.

Clothing, textiles, and fashion are also cultural instruments, which reveal a tacit instrumentalization of collective tastes and desires. The serialization that Claudia Rogge creates in her pictures is therefore a kind of denunciation and, at the same time, expands the domain of the interpretation of cultural processes of replication, production, mimesis, and homogenization. Her works speak of that dominant will, which is embodied in the identification, taking stock of, and cataloguing of the indivisible entities of the subject and its subjectivity.

Aesthetic projects that undertake critical commentary, whether through their visual conception or through an explicitly political argument, compromise the system of value judgments. Not everything explicit and apparent becomes subversive, just as little as all allegorical shifts become banal.

Claudia Rogge’s skill as photographer leads her to develop a plan in which conceptual resources and visual strategies are consistently linked together. The formulas of authority, to which repetitions, standardized programming, and the transformation of human intentions into obedience/submission or disobedience/protest inevitably belong, become visible in the textual design of these surfaces.

It is often the case that the negotiations between the artistic discourse and the political or socio-critical discourse as the case may be, lead to conflicts. The artist is in a position to establish a delicate tension between representation and conflict. The group-oriented phenomenon and the homogenization of the subject in the mass are embodied in her artistic oeuvre. Claudia Rogge’s work makes those alliances that stretch between the picture and the cultural critique visible.

The artist knows repetitions often end in senselessness and the militarization of behaviors, but they also engender cultural mechanisms and anthropological conclusions that nurture the urban mythologies and physical aesthetics of reproduction and rebelliousness.

Claudia Rogge
Warp and Weft

27.8. – 15.10.2022

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