The magic of objects by Nicole Büsing and Heiko Klaas (für deutsch hier klicken)
The center figure of the technically brilliant, early animated film “Fétiche Mascotte“ (1934) of the Polish-Russian film producer Ladislas Starevich is a small puppet dog, that wants to bring an orange to a critically ill child, but gets into a horror trip and has to bear all kinds of adventures. A childens` toy attempts to be life rescuer.
In her series “Mascots”, the painter Hilke Dettmers who lives in Berlin and Hamburg also engages herself in often kitschy, playful puppet tags made from fabrics and ornaments that serve as talisman, fetish or personal charm in most diverse culture areas. Hilke Dettmers is interested in this phenomenon and pays attention to mascots, like they occasionally appear at the inside mirror of cars: chains, association symbols, virility symbols, saints, beasties or folkloristic articles, which are spangled with beads and feathers. The private companion with alleged magic and protective power has already been an accessory of modern automobilists for a long time. This way the originally anonymous car is individualized by its owner and turned into a isolated shelter similarly to the domestic environment.
„Humans do not become domestic in functional environment; they need an indication, a fragment of the genuine cross, which sanctifies the church, a talisman, a piece of absolute authenticity from the innermost reality of life in order to have a justification.“ This is what Jean Baudrillard writes in „The System of Things“, his phenomenological investigation of objects that furnish their personal environments, published in 1968. He describes the car as „complementary to the private apartment, circling around in eccentric courses. Nevertheless, the private seclusion in a sedan is, of course, illusion.
The looks from outside spectators cannot be shielded, nor the view of the painter Hilke Dettmers. She filters mascotts in all their manifestations as individual details from real live everyday traffic and puts them into the center of her painting series. Dettmers does not denunciate, does not by no means make herself a jugde over good or bad taste. Details of the external world like the road, the inside of the car or persons such as drivers and front seat passengers are faded out, at the most the inside mirror is represented. The here and now disappears in the cutout way of the pictures, and so does the distance between viewers and object.
But the apparently banal detail often tells us more about connections of the world than the total summary overloaded with redundant information fragments. There are no acting people on the newer work of the artist any longer. On her investigation walks through public areas Hilke Dettmers discovers lapidary matters of minor importance, which are normally faded out by our perception filters, and she often captures them with the camera.
The following pictorial approximation moves them back into focus: The small picture „Hofecke” (yard corner, 2005) shows a cut out piece of soil with a young tree, once planted with much love into a concrete inner courtyard, but meanwhile the weeds ran riot so that the care and the eagerness of the planting is led ad absurdum.
The picture „Schacht “(Funnel, 2005) depicts a cellar staircase leading down from the curb, which is passed by pedestrians thousandfold, and still escapes their perception. The arcane world behind it, the private world beyond the road is suggested here. Behind the membranaceous basement window a secret or something uncanny can lurk. Hilke Dettmers eliminates the inconspicuousness of the transition from the external to the interior world and makes the neglected offside her subject-matter. The coloring is subtle and pale, greys and beiges are merging and prevailing. The painting appears diffuse and virtually overexposed. No strong expressive lines and colors, unobtrusive suggestions instead of decisive statements, casual questions instead of given answers. Dettmers directs her view to the seemingly insignificant, unconsidered, apparently banal and seldom addressed the spectacular does not interest her.
„Objects will be there, before they are something; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, constant, externally present, mocking their own meaning“, says French writer and literature theoretician Alain Robbe-Grillet in his essay „Arguments for a new novel “, published in 1963. The object with its firm anchorage to reality is one part. Hilke Dettmers with her paintings opens a view into the world behind it, the temporal before and after. A level of reflection, memory, fantasy, play, dream. Unlike Belgian artist Luc Tuymans for example, whose paintings resemble Dettmers`s paintings in their calculated paleness and silhouetted nature and which point to another direction with their historical-political meaning, Hilke Dettmers pursues a rather quiet, casual, sometimes very private view, beyond that of the sensation-seeking.
The interieur of her Berlin apartment on the painting „Ding“ (Thing, 2005) shows real objects: a table with a glass jug, a greenish curtain, a sofa. There are nevertheless moments of irritation, like a black hole behind the half opened curtain or an indefinable red thing on the floor. No world-moving things, but mysteries of everyday life, which question the homely and harmless private idyll.
Public areas, playful forms, architectural details and the force of historical inheritance are the contents of the paintings, Hilke Dettmers did after visiting the Teatro Mediterraneo Mostra d´Oltremare on the fairground of Naples . Here, in 1940, Mussolini presented his imperial fantasies of great power in fascistic and rational, but mediterran influenced splendor architecture. Hilke Dettmers takes a look at the interiors and selects a glass ornamented handrail or the floors of a salon as her motives.
Similarly to the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, who revives and invents places of buried memories in his large slide photographs, Hilke Dettmers here, too, is interested in the memory of places. Dettmers, who has lived in California and Italy for longer periods of time and presently commutes between Hamburg and Berlin is a wanderer between real places, fading memories, and magically loaded objects. In often overlooked details she can discover a whole world.
Nicole Büsing and Heiko Klaas, May 2006