JEANNE FAUST – DI CIÒ CHE HO VISTO NON PARLO

„What I have seen, I won’t talk about” is what Jeanne Faust entitles her exhibition in the Gallery Museum, Bolzano, and so focuses attention on one of the central themes of her artistic work: the relationship between images and language. Moments of imagination, of projections and feelings that stick to the perception and interpretation of images play a major part in Jeanne Faust’s films and photographic work. The pictures which form her new series and are exhibited here, for the first time and to this extent, as a solo show, pick up these elements. They refer to media pictures that try to capture significant events in a concise image, and through the repetition of the same or similar motifs they coagulate to become stereotypical signs. Jeanne Faust uses such pictures as patterns for her silhouettes and photographs them again. The work then passes through various stages of medial transformations and interpretations, until a connection to the motif of the initial picture becomes almost impossible. Yet a feeling of discomfort results, though – or precisely because – an almost frightening beauty inhabits the works. For example, when the picture of a festively decorated street of houses fails to reveal that a fire had recently broken out there. Jeanne Faust is intrigued by the power of seduction that beautiful surfaces possess – and distrusts it completely. In her film IV she shows in a similar way the discrepancy between the linguistic approach to the image and the picture as described. Here we can see a young woman giving two different descriptions of a picture – or, more precisely: a still from a vampire movie – while she fumbles for words. As the title of the exhibition ironically suggests, sometimes it is best to say nothing. Yet, Jeanne Faust’s pictorial language is extremely eloquent. Jeanne Faust was born in 1968 in Wiesbaden and lives in Hamburg. She has had numerous exhibitions and was one of the four final nominees for the National Gallery’s Prize for Young Art, Hamburger Bahnof, Berlin, in 2007. „What I have seen, I won’t talk about” is Jeanne Faust’s first solo show in Italy.