//Jonah Bache | Culture.Room

Since the end of 2020, there has been a turning point in Jonah Bache’s work: His new way of working is in contrast to the last series of works, which he has implemented for the most part with drills or other machine tools. From a purely painterly point of view, he got bogged down too quickly with this, too much medium- too little substance. In terms of content, there was too much ambiguity for him. Moreover, he is always in search of how to fuse abstract painting and narrative story structures into a homogeneous body.

For the occasion he has decided to turn the procedure of the painting process upside down. Instead of adding, he has begun to remove material from the painting support. The consistent decision to remove material turned out to be a productive design tool and an equally fruitful source of insight.

Punching holes with a punch and hammer in PVC or canvas fabric served as a starting point. However, the resulting holes produced a system that was too standardized, rigid, and repetitive, so he tried further experiments and methods of reduction. Although the uniform traces of the punching primarily revealed successful intermediate results, he felt the desire and inner longing for a more fluid, natural and autonomous process. So he decided to burn holes in the canvas fabric.

Working with fire represents the perfect balance between control and loss of control. The lighting of the canvas is done according to the grid of Braille. This is a Braille based on dots. With this writing he manages to communicate in a very obvious as well as encrypted way and at the same moment to complement the actual painting.

Although Braille is internationally understandable, it primarily challenges the untrained viewer to decipher the actual content of what is written. By translating it into Braille, he abstracts not only the narrative, but also the visual image content. Furthermore, Braille is symbolic of the blindness of a large portion of people as they move through the age of the anthropocene. The content of the written text fragments is partly based on the artist’s own formulations of thoughts or addresses different topics regarding the assignment of guilt and responsibility for current or past events.

Jonah Bache was born in Luxembourg City in 1996. There he attended high school with a specialized baccalaureate in “arts et plastiques” and thus devoted himself early to art with a focus on illustration and painting. Influenced by the experiences of various subculture movements, Jonah B. repeatedly came into contact with different forms of design and conception in the commercial as well as the independent art cosmos. In addition to the classical art disciplines, he also devoted himself to photography and video documentation, as well as to traditional tattooing, which had always played an important role alongside painting and illustration. In his early 20s, he moved to Berlin to pursue a BA in illustration and a second degree in textile and surface design at KHB. In addition to his studies, Jonah Bache gained further experience as an artistic assistant, among others with Moritz Neuhoff, and as a craft assistant in galleries such as Office Impart and Konrad Fischer in Berlin