Silent Geometry

Christiane Kaufmann's works are based on mathematically constructed forms and are closely related to concrete art. However, she breaks with its rigorous elimination of traces of human creativity, as the freehand lines and the surface structure of the paper create minimal variations in the structure. By constantly repeating straight lines from a single point, she creates geometric surfaces, often upright rhombuses, through which the underlying paper or ink underpainting shines through. In doing so, she repeatedly explores the space in between: between painting and drawing, between line and surface, between repetition and new creation.

Each of the hand-drawn lines resembles the previous one, but is never a perfect copy.

Christiane Kaufmann's drawings are based on repetition, but paradoxically cannot be copied. They represent a counterpoint to technically precise reproduction. A computer or AI may generate seemingly flawless and endless products, but this very fact makes them arbitrary. Programs do not have to exert themselves, overcome obstacles, or concentrate. Christiane Kaufmann's drawings, however, arise from a struggle with ideas and materials, with form and fallibility—in short, from human creativity.

Time plays a central role in Christiane Kaufmann's work. The constant drawing of lines makes this visible by recording the duration of the working process. Concentration inevitably makes the working method slow and deliberate. And anyone looking at the drawings must engage with this slowness and experience it at the same time—as repetition and rhythm, but also as inner, pure time, as silence.

Mathematical principles play a major role in all of this, for example in dealing with the principle of Truchet tiles. Surfaces and lines meet to form a square divided by the diagonal. It is drawn by hand, digitally reproduced and combined into different arrangements, which in turn provide the basis for hand-drawn works. Once again, she explores the in-between - that between the analog and digital spheres, between man and machine. Her art thus forms a counterpoint to digitality and at the same time is situated in its field of tension.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)