Slightly earlier paintings from the series “Swimming Pools” and “Multiplication” focus on architectural details, pulling the viewer into mysterious indoor worlds where the boundaries of the rooms seem to fall off the edges. Often seemingly void of life, like holding tanks or empty baths, stepped pools and reservoirs appear both enormous yet isolated, highlighted by an unknown light source and reaching to unnerving depths.
Kate Mothes, Jacuzzi Error. Exploring the logic of space with Joanna Tochman, “Dovetail Magazine” 2022
Cranach’s pool, analog large format and medium format photography, 2018
A series inspired by artist’s disturbing obsession with Lucas Cranach’s painting Fountain of Youth.
The rules of the game go as follows: one must copy Cranach’s pool, move it to another location, trace it on the ground using pins and strings, while maintaining the exact proportions of the pool depicted in the painting. The task is not easy—what emerges in the field looks completely different than on the camera’s matrix, it turns out that perspective is a lie, and one has to contort oneself terribly to ensure the outlined shape has the appropriate proportions. In reality, it stretches across the entire meadow and more than a pool resembles a lying pillar.
As if viewed in mirrors that face each other or in the rippling reflection of water, Tochman’s disorienting compositions explore movement and time through spaces that exist between the natural and artificial. Sometimes referencing specific places, like a swimming pool in Szeged, Hungary, the specifics of place are blurred at the periphery. The longer we spend in them, the more dreamlike they become.
Kate Mothes, Jacuzzi Error. Exploring the logic of space with Joanna Tochman, “Dovetail Magazine” 2022
Often seemingly void of life, like holding tanks or empty baths, stepped pools and reservoirs appear both enormous yet isolated, highlighted by an unknown light source and reaching to unnerving depths. When we do encounter living beings, like in the series “Fights”, it is in the form of trout, the collective term for which is a “hover,” when their congregations take a violent turn. What are they doing there? Are they going mad within the confines of their basins?
Kate Mothes, Jacuzzi Error. Exploring the logic of space with Joanna Tochman, “Dovetail Magazine” 2022
