XXXVI Irène Hug

21.11. - 06.12.03

General-Repräsentanz/The All-over Representation

Living in environments overcharged with verbal signs, we have become used to perceiving words without necessarily connecting them to concrete lexical or locutional meanings, i.e. to what they were actually meant to say. As we move through our heavily lettered world, our common reaction towards the sheer amount of names, ads, orders around us is rather to reduce those signs to mere forms, instead of entering in a communicative relation of reception and response. This detachment however could also be seen as a reflection of the intrinsic strangeness, the essential void inbetween any combination of sounds/letters and their peculiar portion of meaning.
Irène Hug's working material are the inscriptions pervasively covering all kinds of surfaces around us: On the one hand she is interested in the potential images and forms within those messages. On the other hand she seriously takes on to read them - as single words and names and also as phrases that were forced by spatial coincidence into mutual narrative relationships. In that sense, Irène Hug is fascinated by the process of abstraction she continues, just as much as she enjoys to foster those verbal stray dogs (or rather flies): She looks after them and she listens, too. That entitles her to superimpose her own intentions on them and to produce her own sense.

(BC)