Onorato Taiyo & Krebs Nico

In the middle of the landscape, a large-format billboard transmits mysterious chromatic messages to the world. The Sendetafel edition [broadcast panel] by Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, consisting of 25 serial unique pieces, combines two visual universes each produced with a different printing technique. The series was created as part of the ongoing process of their Futures work, in which the artists construct futuristic visions based on their own image archive. In 2020, they began cutting out pieces of their large-format negatives with a vector-controlled laser machine. In the empty spaces, they insert elements from other negatives to create new images. Buildings, cities and exhibition displays are recurring motifs. In the case of the Sendetafel, the cut-out field was not filled with a segment from another negative, but with a bright color gradient, a printing process called iris print. This surface was produced with a lithographic procedure, which follows a different logic than the inkjet interpretation of the rest of the image. The color gradient in iris printing consists of sheer ink and is the unique result of a sheet hitting a printing plate. Thus, not only two different printing techniques converge in the edition, but also two temporalities of the printing process. Each sheet of the Sendetafel edition features a different color combination and thus its own, partly poetic, partly surreal mood.

Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs' oeuvre centers on a critical as well as humorous examination of the medium of photography. With their works, they explore questions such as how reality is being depicted through photography and how certain forms of the artistic canon have become established over time. In their series The Great Unreal (2005-2009), created during several journeys through the American West, they appropriated the genre of road trip photography and defamiliarized the classic-looking landscapes by incorporating unexpected elements. Coupled with their interest in the formal language of photography is a fascination with the technical functioning of cameras. In their work As Long as it Photographs, it Must be a Camera (2011), for example, the artists constructed their own analog cameras out of a wide variety of objects such as turtle shells and books. In general, analog processes play an important role in the oeuvre of the artist duo. Thus, it is not surprising that the collage-like photomontages of their Futures work are not produced digitally on the computer, but manually. This can also be seen in their choice of the lithographic process to produce their Sendetafel series. VH