On the Work of Rosa Jaisli
Sculpture is the medium of “change of perspective”. Since Ludwig Wittgenstein, this has been used to describe how different facets come to the fore in the perception of an object. The Austrian philosopher demonstrated the mechanism with a small drawing that could be either a hare or a duck (the flattened version shows a half-naked woman or Freud). Today, people generally focus on the question of the animals, but not on the drawing that depicts both, even though it recedes into the background. A sculpture is always both material and image. While this is true in principle for other media as well, it is only here that the material from which something is made always pushes itself to the forefront. The question then is how these aspects relate to one another in a sculpture: does the eye linger on one, or does a natural, even fluid transition take place? Rosa Jaisli is among the sculptors who explore these in-between spaces. She sets accents that make the various levels visible together. Architecture, image, object, material, sculpture, symbol: her works are always at least two things at once.
roman one
From a cultural-historical perspective, sculpted architecture is mostly a house for spirits or gods. We are familiar with miniature buildings from many cultures that suggest that social structures extend beyond human life. On a small scale, it is also possible to realize a splendor that is unattainable in reality, so that notions and fantasies of status become visible within them. For the invisible deities, only the very best is ever good enough. Conversely, from the real world of these same cultures, we often know only the floor plans preserved in the earth, which provide clues as to how people situated themselves in actual space.
Rosa Jaisli explicitly cites archaeological excavations as the inspiration for her sculptures and combines anthropological and cultural-historical associations with the modern sculptural question of inside and outside. The impression arises that this thematic aspect develops during the creative process. The fundamental interest takes concrete form in the sculpture without being a direct cause. Those familiar with floor plans and aerial photographs of (South American) excavation sites may be reminded of them by individual forms, but the connection is never direct. The artist has images in her mind, and so does the viewer. As soon as an edge in the alabaster is read as a step or an opening as a door, the scale shifts and the work oscillates between sculpture and architecture. The same applies to perforations that become windows or clearings that turn into passageways, all of which can in turn dissolve back into abstract formal relationships. Alabaster, with its translucent quality, stimulates this shift. Hard geometry is not possible in it, since even the sharpest line softens in daylight. Jaisli suppresses any notion of decorum. Proportions point to architectural contexts, but the details are missing, so that a viewer following the trail of architecture returns to sculpture. Yet the image of walls and buildings keeps imposing itself. There is a hint of architecture over these sculptures.
roman two
There are literally different directions in sculpture, and it is worth reflecting on them. A form acts purposefully into the surrounding space; it generally pushes outward or moves inward. In Jaisli’s work, the movement always clearly proceeds from all sides into the material. The claimed space is located within the sculpture, and this encourages the viewer to seek the specific scale within the individual work. The fact that her works are mostly relatively small is then irrelevant. More important are the proportions and relationships within the shaped stone. Her sculptures are autonomous in an old-fashioned sense. They await a viewer and do not impose themselves.
Jaisli’s sculpture stands in the tradition of modern abstract stone sculpture, combining four strands: first, the idea of working directly in stone; second, the basic geometric form as a starting point; third, the focus on negative space; and fourth, the symbolic effect. She cites her teacher Adriaan van den Ende (b. 1920) and the Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza (1909 – 2003) as her role models; Oteiza was one of the first to explore stereometric negative space in the 1950s. He was influenced by the ideas of early abstract painters and their search for spirituality and had already been exploring South American megalithic sculpture in the 1930s. The fundamental difference between architecture and sculpture plays a decisive role in reflections on space within the Spanish-speaking discourse. While this discussion was only indirectly received in Germany, Jaisli is familiar with the original sources. What — according to Oteiza — would it be like if a building were a giant sculpture into which a viewer could enter? Conversely, a piece of sculpture would then be an interplay of spaces that could only be perceived from the outside. This fundamental idea serves as the inspiration for Jaisli’s sculptures. However, she is also familiar with the other aspect of this Basque artist — who is scarcely known here — as an influential art theorist and critic of the mechanisms of the art world. Sculpture, according to Oteiza, makes the artist a better individual because he is shaped by the slow process of creation. If, as the avant-gardists prescribed, he wanted to achieve something in society, however, he would have to join a union or become politically active—which the sculptor himself did after he stopped making art in 1960. Understood in this way, abstract sculpture can be political. Society takes place differently.
Against this backdrop, it becomes clear why Jaisli has no interest in fundamentalisms. Her work develops slowly, and she allows for tangential paths with great naturalness. Alongside her abstract alabaster and paper sculptures — which feature comparable motifs and the interplay between positive and negative forms — she has created delicate figurative paper works in which the artist references classic highlights of art history. Tiny cut-out empty spaces become lines, a shift in perspective that defines their impact. Through the remnants of the cut-away paper, the work gains a minimal yet effective three-dimensional depth. This “relative spatiality” is the common thread running through Jaisli’s work. It is never a matter of entering the space in an architectural sense, but rather of viewing it from the outside in a sculptural sense and understanding how the individual empty spaces interlock, expand, and eventually become forms in their own right.
Gerhard Marcks House