Public Art > Janaina Tschäpe - Louis Vuitton

Miami, Florida, 2013

Janaina’s works have many influences mixing German romanticism, surrealism and a great passion for Nature. She belongs to a generation of "performance art". Nature is key is all her works. Her performances, paintings and drawings are looking for what man's Nature is about, what space human beings are occupying. Organic forms are always part of her works. Often in the context of the sea or water, from her own body, the artist is considering themes such as mermaids, hybrid models and studying the representation of the feminine.  She is often mixing references coming from Art History but also from sciences, biology and botanic working on ambiguous situations without being far for a socio-political concern.

Recently she has been fascinated by the geometrical space. She started to work on how human body is linked with the space, how mathematical references can be observed at each step of physical properties. "The Ocean Within", an installation made of two large cutouts on watercolor paper and the video she produced in January 2013 in Mexico, for Louis Vuitton belongs to the same body of her last researches.

The present video also follows researches that the artist started to work on last year. it shows natural growths equated with balloon-like shapes that point into a universe of abstractions and intangibles. The artist wants a kind of artistic magic realism which went mad. In the coupling between the life like and the abstract, one senses a longing for the exotic, the extra-sensory and the fantastic, where all things are possible. The artist wants the supernatural rooted in the form be understood in a concrete sense an accepted on its own terms

Paper is more than a canvas hidden behind paint, charcoal, ink or other various mediums.  Its properties are more powerful than that.   It is a material with no boundaries, a medium known for its flexibility, giving ideas and thoughts another venue to become a physical form. In Janaina Tschäpe's new work she explores the organic grounds of the canvas, forming paths of abstract shapes along the way.