Text on my work on "Painting on Photography" in English by Kilian Ochs

Cognition is inseparable from the psychology of the will.

Considering that perception of reality is, in its essence, construction of the real – what does this mean in regards to the photographic image which is indeed nothing else than a direct impression of the reality onto a photo-sensitive layer? How can one transpose the indifferent aversion of “objectivity” – to which the photographic image bears witness – into an image space of tangibility? What methods need to be used in the imaging process to allow for this concretion, and what kind of stimulus appeals to an observer when looking at an image which contains and concerns the representation of his own perceptive process? How will this feedback feel like?

In Wataru Murakami’s images the indifferently detached – the object of the hidden per se: the landscape – exists as it were immaterial, almost abstract, that is, a technical printing product, emanated from the photographic process which is at least to the same degree of immaterialist nature. “To fetch and bring the detached object” means: to materialize it, to attach it to the tangible, to found it in the comprehensible, to “set it up”. Through a manual color application, Murakami perfects the photographic image with something that it rejects and represses on its own. He provides weight to it and makes it truly present.

The view of the yearning subject (and the subject is deeply yearning by nature) is hardly perception, but essentially construction and “setting up”. He who obviously yearns constructs landscape, rather than imagining it. The “representing” image which usually blocks the way between the incomprehensible and the view, must be skipped. Murakami’s images do neither represent landscape as an object nor do they present it as a tamed, domesticated rip-off of itself. The landscape rests in its own nature and is being brought here in its foreignness and closeness. That is only possible because in every image, the process of construction of the real is implemented in its action, instead of being presented in its results.

It is, however, the nature of this construction of yearning, that, in return, it wants to hide from its creator and describes its results as something pre-existing to him. The impact of the subjective on the objective is gentle but powerful, subtle but brutal, inconspicuous but essential, denying but truthful.

Kilian Ochs, 2011