Renate Krammer, Lines, 2016, Installation view at Palazzo Mora.

Lines
The reduction to the line is an attempt to free it from that which is unnecessary and to emphasize the essential.
The line is in a sense also a metaphor for things that come into being and thereby leave behind perceptible traces of an existence.
As a primary element of design, the line is in its reduced usage not at all of simplistic nature, for the line in itself becomes loaded with meaning. Through variations of form or through the proportions of variations to one another, lines become charged with energy. Nevertheless it remains open to the attention of the viewer whether the spaces between the lines or the lines themselves become the focal point.
A line develops: the pencil/the paint glides – every emotion causes a variation. Thus the line turns into an expression of every movement.
The tip of a guided pencil naturally assimilates itself to the material circumstances, will be influenced and changed by the corporeal properties of the paper – soft and hard pencil leads; fine, smooth, rough, coarse paper – the inadequacy of the hand and finger – everything that leaves behind traces and variations. No stroke, no line is identical with another.
Meditative, apparently calm: everything in motion becomes visible in fine subtleties. Though the line – drawn freely by hand – arises expression that is comparable to handwriting or a musical score; written script without words that generates poetry.
In today’s world, where the spectacle stands to such a degree in the foreground, delicacy and minimal representation become subversive.
I want with my reduced work to compel a more exact observation – one searches to find the key to the work and decode the alleged hidden information. However, there are no connections of meaning given – the only meaning lies in the eye of the viewer, in the time and attention that one dedicates to the work. Empathy for the immediate and the insignificant should stimulate pauses and make visible the factor of time.
Appropriations of Space
Renate Krammer’s concept for the exhibition “Time-Space-Existence” envisions a space no longer defined by the conventional parameters of length by width by height, but rather through specific intensities that enable different perceptions of space. Ever since the “Spatial Turn”, space has been understood no longer as a Cartesian box, rather as a field of possibility, as a cultural dimension. A room should not merely be entered more or less to be in it, rather one should enter into a relationship with this room, interact with it in order to achieve a different, longer-lasting experience of space.
Carrying further the thoughts of Peter Sloterdijk, Krammer comprehends space as a multidimensional fabric of correlations, how things, architecture and people are intertwined. Her focus lies especially on the way they are interwoven, because different manners bring forth different qualities of space. To design a room is therefore with intention “to enter into a fabric in which diverse experiences as well as insights take place and begin to make alterations in the weave of this fabric”, as the architecture theorist Franziska Hederer once wrote.
For the Palazzo Mora, Krammer has suggested an installation in which a fabric is literally stretched out in the room. From a loose net suspended beneath the ceiling, twelve drawings are hung which are near life-size and seem to float in space in such a way that the graphic structure of the drawing sheets are visible from every position. The alternating taking-in of various observational perspectives is also to be understood as a strategy of opening up the space. At the same time, the spatial quality of the work should be emphasized by the lighting and their casted shadows made visible on the walls.
Drawing is in general thought of as being the medium of artistic experimentation and immediacy of expression, as being the most spontaneous formulation of what one feels in the very act of seeing and of thinking (Walter Koschatzky). However Krammer, as draughtswoman, confronts this idea of spontaneous, creative effusion with concept and deceleration. With repetitive persistence, she draws horizontal lines with steady frequency and intensity from the top of the page to the bottom. With their dense sequentiality, the individual line loses its meaning in support of a planar fusion, one broken through small hooks or omitted linear features that impart a semantic structure to the whole. In their calm progression, the level lines melt into optical nets, which both reveal and hide upon the semi-transparent silk paper.
On the opposite side of the installation are three picture-objects which take up the theme of the horizon addressing the boundaries of space. Krammer has engraved horizontal lines in four sheets of plexiglass positioned in front of one another over a black background. As such, the work gains the effect of spatial depth and opens an abstract landscape view, which in sense of the original German definition of boundary references the spaces on this side and the other of a line.
The last work in her room is a video which shows the process of drawing lines, one that ultimately reveals the icon of a book. Whomever draws a line, does indeed draw the line. The drawer registers, notes down, sketches and essentially follows the concept of recording even as a book does. The spectrum of meaning of the book symbol as carrier of information, as overcomer of boundaries, as cultural asset is near immeasurable; hence the reference here to the time horizon of the process of making both a drawing as well as a book, revealed symbolically in the video.
The appropriation of space, the sounding-out of its limitations, the drawing of lines and the experience of these lines is always a perception of and reflection upon the boundaries of space. And since our body is our organ of perception and our reference point to the world, one can in the truest sense of the word speak of “borderline experiences” when perceiving the works of Renate Krammer in her room.