Jonas Maria Ried
Excerpt from the opening speech by Dr. Veronika Heilmannseder on the occasion of the exhibition UNDER FALLING WATER
[...] We can go to the cinema in a snowstorm or turn a spruce like a prayer wheel. We can even draw concentric circles around slender spruces in a light, elegant way.
We can watch over and over again as the water cascades down from the rocks and see how fresh green grass in the middle of the snowy desert heralds spring.
We can experience cows as sensual beings when they turn their heads to listen to the overtone sound from the large Allgäu didgeridoo alphorn. Touching, in the midst of the economised barn environment.
But these invitations of an aestheticised gaze are ambiguous.
When I first heard about Jonas, a gallerist friend said, ‘You'll like him, he wants you to think twice.’ I think that's a good point. Jonas Maria Ried's works encourage us to encounter the mountains, water, forest and meadows, the landscape, the cattle. But they always disrupt our expectations themselves.
Never intrusive, but always consistent, Jonas Maria Ried questions expectations, conventional perceptions and commonplaces. Colours and sounds are used just as consciously in his works as the visual language and his own actions, which he documents on film. On this meta-level, we are drawn into the artistic statement and the symbolic confrontation with the themes he has chosen.
Of course we dam up watercourses elsewhere, destroying natural habitats and ruthlessly subjugating nature. So what happens when a Caspar David Friedrich figure manipulates a stream and triggers the waterfall with his own hands, making it reproducible, removing it from nature?
Of course, we create countless growth cubes in order to artificially induce growth in them - in isolation, as in the white cubes. No matter how inhospitable the surroundings or how much effort is required for a smaller or larger piece of lawn - in the sense of Albrecht Dürer.
Or how we like to think of ourselves in a cosy cabin, a hut that is a modern-day hideaway from the everyday hustle and bustle of the world - a homely retreat! What does a beautiful, chimney-crowned cabin, flirting with the hashtag #cabinporn, do in the middle of a pattering waterfall?
We become observers of the raw confrontation between the human primal symbol of warming sedentariness - house and hearth - and the cold violence of the elements. We are thus asked to clarify our own point of view with ourselves. We are forced to confront ourselves.
Is nature a backdrop for aesthetic or need-driven people? When and how does it put us in our place and turn us into helpless extras in its unfathomable game? Who controls whom here?
THE STAGE OF NATURE (extracts)
Text: Moritz Stangl
On the occasion of the exhibition ‘WE GREW SOME EYES’ at Villa Merkel
When I first met Jonas Maria Ried, we were travelling down a mountain pass in the Alps - by bike. Jonas slept in a one-man tent at night, which kept the rain out so badly that puddles formed in it after a short time. The next morning, he explained to me that he did push-ups until his body heat had warmed the air in the tent. Then the moisture in the puddles would evaporate on its own, so that it was quite dry downstairs until the condensation started to drip from the tent ceiling again in the morning. I believe that this anecdote also tells us something about Jonas Maria Ried's work. His artistic approach can perhaps be understood as a humorous and desperate attempt to re-stage nature in an experimental way.
The crude idea of creating a mini-ecosystem from rain and evaporation in his sleeping tent is nothing other than the everyday facet of an equally experimental and theatrical relationship to ecology.
[...]In his works, Jonas Maria Ried repeatedly alienates the dominant images of nature of the 19th century, not only to question them ironically, but rather to translate something of them into a contemporary way of thinking, which conceptualises the relationship between man and nature in completely different terms of networking, systems, interaction and communication.
[...]And in the anecdote about the damp tent, it is not difficult to recognise the figure of the hiker who seeks contact with raw nature. In the video work ‘Wassersturz’, Jonas Maria Ried appears as a romantic figure on his back, looking at a mighty cliff in the background. The surroundings of mossy, washed-out rocks, fallen trees and remnants of ice and snow give the impression of rough, wild nature.
The only disturbing element is a thin white line in the centre of the picture, which turns out to be a rope that Ried pulls to trigger a waterfall on the cliff via an invisible mechanism - the sublime effect of nature turns out to be a direct influence of the subject.
Through the act with which the figure from behind acts directly into the natural scenery, nature falls out of the picture, so to speak - it becomes a theatre backdrop or model landscape.
In Jonas Maria Ried's work, nature is obviously not something that can be viewed from a window, but requires active staging.
[...] His engagement with nature is a work with living matter, but as such also a work on the symbols, images and metaphors that materially shape this nature. The process of ‘re-staging’ in Jonas Maria Ried's works consists of the permanent reshaping of the symbolic and material forms of nature, that ‘constant exchange of forms’ in which Bruno Latour sees the task of man in the symbolic-ecological system of a globalised nature.