Evelina Cajacob

The new works by Evelina Cajacob show whimsical fields of lines unfolding across a sheet of paper. First gently and calmly set, then sweeping and arching vividly, the lines seem to move with graceful ease within the pictorial space. The two lithographs convey a sense of transparency, space, and tactility. They bear witness to Evelina Cajacob's many years of graphic exploration of the line as an elementary means of design. Stroke by stroke, gesture by gesture, the artist explores the evocative power of line structures. As a ray, thread, or stripe, the line always remains intact and recognizable as such, but at the same time, in interaction with its peers, it transforms into waves, fabric, volume, and movement.

For these works, Evelina Cajacob drew directly onto the lithography stone. In doing so, the artist played with the pressure exerted on the grease crayon to create different stroke widths. Using subtle shades of color, she also suggests the fading intensity of the ink. This effect is reminiscent of the artist's ink drawings and lends a painterly quality to her lithographs. The dancing planes extend beyond the edge of the sheet, evolving into a movement that transcends space and the origin of which can only be found in our imagination. Indeed, Cajacob's weaves of lines speak to our fantasy. They raise the question of where the line ends and becomes a spatial experience, visualizing the fluid transition from the abstract to the figurative.

Evelina Cajacob's work is characterized by a strong continuity that comprises her sculptural practice, drawings, and videos. Thus, the exploration of repetitive movement, reduction of form, and spatiality, present in the current edition, is a common theme in her oeuvre. The Kunstmuseum Chur and the Kunstmuseum Bochum dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to Evelina Cajacob in 2019/2020. Her works are represented in the collections of these two museums as well as the city of Chur and the canton of Graubünden, among others.

"At the beginning of the current print work, the idea was to photographically implement a section of a large-format drawing. This technique enables me to compress the drawing and thus make it denser. The drawing itself thus recedes into the background. The central theme of this work is the process of finding - from the search to the decision. It begins with the search for the right section, for the right colour tone and ends with the decision, a decision that has to be made in the knowledge that another section, another colour tone could have been the right one. This subjective ambivalence, these objective alternatives find their expression in two different shades of red and in Japanese paper, which by nature has different shades of colour. For despite the decision for a certain cutout, it ultimately remains open whether the only right choice was really made or whether other variants could have been implemented. Every choice is relative and the absolute remains an idea."