About Veronika’s work
Text by Sofie Van Loo

Veronika Pot confronts the taboo of “beauty” in an ambivalent way, comparable to how experimental painter Sigmar Polke approached it in his paintings, photographs, and films.

Pot starts from analogue photography (taken with a normal camera or a pinhole camera), but does not use it as an endpoint. She frequently manipulates the photographs in the darkroom during long sessions, applying over- and underexposure. She also scratches away parts or adds elements with needle and thread. Afterwards she often works with collage and acrylic paint on these manipulated images, which she later digitises.

Variation, disturbance, and a certain degree of uncontrollability or chance are thus invited into the image, although she simultaneously attempts to recognise recurring patterns within her oeuvre. Her intensive artistic method produces a disorienting aesthetic experience in which foreground and background, or the distance between the underlying image and the additions, constantly shift, as if the image were retrieved from memory and re-emerging in the present.

Pot’s work indeed revolves around memory, reconstruction, and image transformation. She undermines the idea of photography as a pure registration of reality, as if adding a form of “intimacy,” even in her landscapes, which appear to have lost something from the image itself, or to have leaked out of it. Remarkably, she endows digital photography with qualities it does not inherently possess, although the saturated or fluorescent colours, she also works in black and white, where similar effects can be observed, recall the analogue era, which has meanwhile long passed: when light could still alter a chemical surface and traces of a physical process could be read as chemically registered presence. It is grain, also as matter, and the opaque or mysterious way in which colour operates in interaction with applied manipulations that produces a vibrating, tactile image structure in the transition to a digital image.

Time in Pot’s work is experienced affectively: what is seen can be felt physically, as if time is explosively present in the image, indirectly offering a different conception of subjectivity, one less driven by consumption. Is the moment truly entirely past, as Roland Barthes claims in Camera Lucida (1980) and should one mourn this nostalgically (one’s own death)? The detail within the image that personally affects, strikes, or pierces you (Barthes’ punctum), as well as the gaze or atmosphere emanating from the image, is in Veronika Pot’s work consistently granted the possibility of displacement: something (else) can, at a later stage, continually acquire new “meaning”. It is as though she introduces an existential dimension into photography, one that carries it not only beyond the notion of mere registration, but also beyond anything like the simple conveyance of information or the straightforward communication of a personal opinion or testimony.

 

Life In The Woods, 2011, Gelatin silver print drymounted on disband, 60 x 40 cm, Ed. 1/2​

Voices often speak through her work, which may be associated with people in war zones, with those affected by violence, or with those situated amidst unrest or revolution. She explores how language can be misused or how meaning can change over time. In confronting her work, whether her manipulated ruin-like landscapes, mountains, palm trees, a swimming pool, nudes, women’s legs, a doubling of a Bambi or fawn, or more abstract images, one is reminded of how intense and resonant a (travel) experience may have been, and how simultaneously “superficial” and “profound” it can be.

Her images equally demonstrate how readily memories can fade and dissipate when they are not actively engaged with, preserved, or given renewed meaning. This gives her work a cinematic or literary dimension, as if she seeks to keep what was once fixed in constant motion and endow it with a fictional, poetic, or imaginative perspective, so that it can continue to resonate into the future (which may be the opposite of what Philip Huyghe does in his work). Perhaps this position, as a (lesbian) artist, could be described as “radically romantic” (cf. Emeline Descreaux), a quality that is, moreover, remarkably prevalent within experimental electronic music, particularly among lesbians, bisexuals, and trans women. It is as though, through this sensibility, a profound necessity is articulated: the necessity for a world in which dreaming remains possible, in which desire can still find an object and a horizon, despite the fact that these very capacities appear to be continually eroded within contemporary existence.

It evokes the image of a fire that consumes everything while simultaneously igniting and animating everyone in its vicinity, leaving us with the imperative to embrace and experience, above all, the unfolding of that very process.