Words by Amanda Vandenberg
Shiny Ruin by Jorg Karg. Germany
Jorg Karg is a German photographic artist working in the realm of digital collage. Karg’s exploration of the medium acts as a way to build a language, with the cutting and additive nature expanding its boundaries. Using complementary source material, the disparately drawn fragments that have happened elsewhere take on the shape of a harmonious whole. There is a musical, feverish quality to the making of the work, as though Karg needs to exaggerate elements to unveil their meaning.
The results are minimalist dreamscapes that follow formal rules of color, shape, and style. We come face to face with monochromatic tones, soft curves rather than edges, a clean romanticism given color by scene- setting titles. Karg says he likes to approach his work as though through the eyes of the old masters, wondering what they would have made if they had the opportunity to use cameras and modern editing software.
Most enrapturing about Karg’s assemblages is the permeability between figure and object. The precise accuracy with which parts are twisted and overlaid makes the original divergent fractions indecipherable from one another. This is especially true in “Weight on Their Shoulders,” where arms, wings, and architecture twist together, like an inter-dimensional contortionist preening in the evening. Within “Shiny Ruin,” limbs of indistinct origin are in full focus while the facial details have fallen vague. “Strange Fruits” is Karg’s most surrealist work, with a figure comfortably perched on a high-contrast banana. Though harboring an intuitiveness, the universe Jorg Karg has constructed is always one step ahead of comprehension.
