Thomas Draschan - Psychic Images Collision
To Bollywood background music, the blonde sucks on her partners erect prick with relish, then we see how he generously lathers her hairy fanny with soap…a porn movie? No, silly – an art video by Thomas Draschan.
Why do we constantly need images and want to reflect, recreate ourselves in them? Certainly they allow us to to enjoy insights unattainable to us by ourselves alone. They help us to escape, to distract and to intoxicate ourselves
but at the same time bear the danger of overwhelming, narcotizing and alienating us.
Deconstructing, dismantling and dissolving of the images implies loosening or at least weakening the ideological ties which inform their conception, production and reception, making them accesible to an alternative reading. This appropriation also connotes criticism, although in Thomas Draschan's case no ostensibly political posturing in the sense of manifest criticism of media or capitalism is being transmitted.
His collages do not force the new nexus between originally unconnected images upon the viewer, he forms allegories which wrest away the single elements from the context and isolate it, thus stripping it of its function.
It is essentially about fragments, the elements of found material are decontextualized und the appearance of totality, present in conventional works, is being fractured.
Draschan neither creates nor destroys; the received result is neither an exclusive product of his nor of the viewer’s subjectivity. Many sequences are already perfect the way they are found, revealing, be it on the conscious, semi-conscious or subconscious level.
He takes the liberty of a new staging that takes possession of the realm of public images for private use, by use of added visual and sound effects. The discontinuities of the editing force the viewer to perceive and determine implicit meanings. The justification of this editing is founded in the possibility of reproducing a mental process in which one image follows the other, determined by the content on which our attention is focused.
Of course these films challenge us to the question whether this is still art or not.
The piece claims to create allegories by virtue of the non.-linear principle underlying the interaction, allocation, adjacency, connection of the images, which mutually implies isolation and inversion of scenes and images into a different context, in order to unhinge the subjacent idea from the apparent banality and to decipher the false naturality lying under the physiognomies and characteristical configurations that encode our habitual perception.
In the end this transposition of objects within the virtual world changes nothing at all. It only brings the structures of art to consciousness, the former requiring a certain historical development before these metaphors become possible. In the video scenes, images and sounds are interlaced and like in the collage a surface emerges in which mental incisions create free spaces in order to find insights and inspirations. Draschan’s work is a perpetual search, an opening towards the interior through the surface, where the levels are entangled and the visual surface becomes object instead of being merely a foundation. (Text: Cem Angeli)