ULF SAUPE ‘Immediacy’

Ulf Saupe (Halle Saale, 1979) received his degree in Fine Arts from the University of Kassel, specialising in experimental photography under the tutelage of Floris M. Neussüs. Since 2005, he has been exhibiting his work in international museums and galleries, developing his own language and technique, which is somewhat “alchemical”. For his exhibition in San Antonio Abad he has prepared works based on his experience in the Canary Islands.

Saupe shifts from the photographic to the aesthetic and conceptual, which allows him to rethink the limits of “painting”. Immediacy, in a sense, an extraordinary “open work” that offers the viewer images that are both quasi-abstract and hyper-concrete. Saupe proposes a process in which the camera creates a document that is then subjected to sedimentation, which leads not so much to the development as to the production of a form that evokes the reverie of the aquatic in Bachelard’s terms.

Due to his obsession with his computational connection of the “more is more” philosophy with the tsunami of image fury, Ulf Saupe materialises meditative images that invite us to take time. This is not a nostalgic regression or an anachronistic pictorialism, but a search for a radically contemporary beauty in which the purposeful and the random are equally important.

Saupe works are alive or, at least, convey the process of metamorphosis of existence. From ash to gold leaf, from shadow to light, his dialectical imagination transports us from the territorial to the allegorical. This artist makes his pigments from the earth he has trodden, insisting on an art of the immediate that separates us from the superficial. His images are permeated by a sincere ecological concern, offering (in spite of everything) a horizon of hope.

Fernando Castro Flórez
Exhibition curator

IMAGE GALLERIES

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