Galerie Daniel Buchholz
Neven-DuMont-Str. 17 50667 Köln
Tel 0221-2574946 Fax 253351
post@galeriebuchholz.de
www.galeriebuchholz.de

Henning Bohl
“La revue blanc”

14 July - 26 August, 2006
opening reception on Friday, 14 July, 7-9 pm

Dear …, I fear there is not so much of a spicy detail to be found here. As I wrote to you I was thinking of trying to transport the fine and applied arts turn-of-last-century thing into the reality of now. So one thing was to develop this empty structure of the ‘Poster Book’ posters and to divide it into pages for the ‘Poster Book’. This was about designing a book that could be a poster and a poster that could be a book as an act of applied working but without the transported content or task you usually find in advertising posters. Also free of obvious references besides the sheer act of designing or manifacturing. There is also the aspect of unique manifactured books which appear like mass produced. This is where the shelf comes in. The shelf is, compared to the issues of the book it contains, like effort to outcome, as it is much too big and the books are reduced to a simple pile of paper. It is in itself a variable structure or grid and it is part of different possibilities of presentation which are presented in the show.

As the ‘Poster Book’ functions as a reference-less empty structure I thought of different ways to present it as a product which would also reinvite different sorts of references. So there are, besides the shelf, the wooden stretchers with the black silhouettes of a french Lady advertising ‘La Revue Blanche’ or ‘Blanc’ and holding a ‘Poster Book’ in her Hands. (She was taken from a poster by Bonnard, a participant in the historical ‘La Revue Blanche’. I took a Revue Blanche just by the name and imagined it at best as an empty magazine which of course fascinated me according to the Idea of the ‘Poster Book’.) (She was also identified as Misia, friend of Coco Chanel and married to the Publisher of ‘La Revue Blanche’. May be there is something spicy to be found but I haven´t read the biography yet.) At least there are the Posters where the silhouette, the structure of the ‘Poster Book’ with its white parts, different logos and parts of graffiti traces come together in a more free or decorative way or as sort of theater as you will. Here are also the Logos of this ‘Wall’ bus stops I told you about. If you look through the glasses of these bus stops with their rhombic logos and you see advertisings, people waiting and reflections of yourself and the surroundings, it is very much what I had in mind.