Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Like rock tumbler jeweling its stones, Jochims smoothes his. A simple process, wiping away the rough, a polish, revealing pools. Dumb rocks become gems. Why we like polished rocks, that is a good question.

See too: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (3) 

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Against Jochims' more splintered or fractured here is an exhibition of sculpture looking more digested. There is analogy to be made in the sculptor as an intestinal tract: Freed from the structure and striations of skeletal muscle that once predicated historical (figurative) sculpture, the smooth muscle sculptor digests like an intestinal tube that is artist's erosion in time. Time is tube in this metaphor.  Time over the open touch of just rubbing, frottage until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification. Smooth muscle occurs mostly in the gut, uterus, walls of blood vessels, bladder, sphincter, etc.- the body's transit tubes - and these sculptures look like the things those organs produce: turds, early fetuses, blood cells, kidney stones. Things warmed in the gut of the artist.


Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2)

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Jewels or portals, the tension-confusion. A faceted sapphire is both; painting a jewel for your wall. Precious stones do have a patient resistance to our looking, and we try to cut them to out will, but the more you polish gems for eyes the further they seem from us.

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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The sign/icon that isn't there, and the emptiness stemming from. Shapes generally denotes an object that should be telling us something, instead a vacancy.



Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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That these, like their colors, don't really make sense, an indifference to fitting explicably well within contemporary grey flesh, like glass shard splinters or loose teeth's minor annoyance become ugly terror through small but repeated insistence.