Illuminations and Flying Carpets

The starting point of the ongoing series of pictures is photographic. The title Illuminations alone points to their origin: light – lighting, staging, celebration – to setting in light. Light is the precondition of colour and of seeing at all, and therefore also of painting and photography.

These true-to-life situations, linked to excessive, lavishly staged parties and receptions, call for a detour – taking the images away with the help of photography – and it is precisely this that makes possible the atmospheric experiments leading to the results shown here: abstract plays of light against a real background of urban life, everyday life and surroundings, transformed into painting. They tell of Berlin’s nights, of thrilling and exciting incidents, of encounters full of pleasure and euphoria. They make Berlin glow and shimmer as never seen before. They make the city appear as one large environment. In the taz, Hubi W. Jäger was therefore called a “magician of light” (B. Werneburg). His pictures tell of glamour while at the same time hinting at its dark side, the crash. They span an arc from the 1920s, photography and experiments such as those of Raoul Hausmann, Erich Comeriner and Moholy-Nagy, and even Lesser Ury’s night pictures, to the present day.

“The pictures lie on the streets of the city,” says Hubi W. Jäger, “they lie in wait for us on every corner.” The artist is constantly on the move in the city – a flâneur, a connoisseur of its beauty and ugliness, its ecstasies, its abysses, its informative memory. We only have to look and be ready to recognise and find them. This is precisely his working principle. Things deceive us, they confuse us and our view of the world. He calls on us to look again – to look behind things and behind everyday life. With the help of photography he takes them with him and transforms them into his painting (Illuminations or Portraits of the Streets [“Portraits von den Strassen”]) or he picks up pieces of plastic from the street, relics of the consumer society, which he processes into assemblages (Asphalt Flowers, Flying Carpets, among others [“Asphaltblumen”, “fliegende Teppiche”]) or he uses found things –

objets trouvés – for situational descriptions of places (Journey from… [“Reise von…”], among others)… A life between glamour and trash.

Hubi W. Jäger is a seeker of traces, a curious observer, a discoverer of our urban environment, a contemporary urban archaeologist with an eye for the cultural and political layers of a present time that is lost or plastered over with posters. An eye-opener. And yet they are all just pictures.