Artist / Kris Scholz
Kris Scholz
I always liked the German painter Siegmar Polke, who died in 2010. His painting entitled as Carl Andre in Delft inspired my series of floors. It was not only that Polke made fun of the Conceptual Art, but for me it was interresting, that he painted something flat on a flat canvas. For a painter this was nothing new, as we know for example Kasimir Malewitch’s black square paintings since 1915, which do not show any depth effect. But for me as a photographer, whose pictures usually reflect the 3 dimensional world on to a 2 dimensional print, it was a radical decision.
In 1989 I started to take photos of floors and walls in Morocco and Barcelona with my 13x18 sinar studio camera and inlarged them to 160x120cm. The result was amazing, because from the distance the pictures looked like abstract arrangement but from closeness they became sites where something had happened. They were full of scratches, marks and traces, which could be read by an experienced detective.
In the beginning of 2012 I was looking for equivalent tile floors in Beijing, but only found tiles on the walls. I found many interesting structures on walls and on ceilings. As I was focussing on floors, especially on marks at locations, were political and cultural activities had happend, I went primarely to places of cultural importance.
Later this year, in Cill Rialiag in Ireland, I couldn't find any interesting marks on the floors or on the walls. But what I found where unconcious abstract colour combinations on table plates, benches and boards, where various artists had mixed there paint before using it on the canvas. By taking photos of these anonymous compositions and structures in the same way as I did before with the floors, the found pieces became wonderful abstract paintings.
