Daniel Roth - Love Letters from Rijeka
Galerie Fons Welters - Back Space
17 Mar – 28 Apr 2001
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Galerie Fons Welters is very pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Holland of the German artists Daniel Roth (Schramberg, 1969).
Daniel Roth's work always tells a strange tale. His installations which are comprised of wall-drawings, drawings on thick white surfaces, photographs and large organic-like shapes, come together like pieces in a detective story. At once aloof - through their very clean and sparse technique - and at the same time intriguing - due to their secretive nature - these installations draw the viewer into their specific narrative yet withhold much of the story-line. It is as if we are given the details but not the general plot. At least not at first glance. Once our eyes have 'focused,' once we have 'read' the evidence and reconstructed the whole, then we begin to understand that we too have become part of the tale. Roth references different levels of space, both the literal space of the exhibition and the figurative space in the drawings and photographs. In doing so he dissects architectural constellations making of rooms, bridges, tunnels and of landscapes "psycho-geographic conditions", as he calls them.
In his exhibition in Galerie Fons Welters entitled Love letters from Rijeka Roth spins a tale about a town in a valley hidden under concrete. 'The house the visitor drops into while visiting the show is an old restaurant. Only one woman resides in it. The concrete has left her isolated and she spends her days like a ghost in the ghost-town of her own domicile.' She walks from one level to another through sparse spaces, of which we as viewers, are only offered fragmentary glimpses. Roth though quite generous with these fragments is much more charitable with the 'holes' connecting them: he shows us only bits and pieces of the almost empty architecture and allows us, or rather entices us, to imagine the rest. We move through black holes and secret doors and through time passages connecting spaces in our mind.
[Maxine Kopsa]