SANDRA KOLONDAM

Exaggerated reality: on the trail of the essence of things

Realism and also hyperrealism are terms that art historians associate with Sandra Kolondam's painting. For what do we see prima vista in her paintings? It is always objects or real things. Sometimes they are captured in the long shot, sometimes in a detail that is chosen in such a way that we only realise on closer inspection that the chosen perspective makes the unfamiliar, the easily overlooked visible to us. Our gaze is also drawn to representational objects and fabrics that are painted with great precision and detail, so that they ultimately appear mysterious. Then objects and bodies that we know from daily observation are combined in Kolondam's painting in such a way that we as viewers end up standing before small parallel universes, unfamiliar worlds. 

The interplay of these traditional and modern facets of reality-based painting is typical of the art of the early 21st century. As early as 2004, the Schirn in Frankfurt dedicated an extensive fundamental exhibition entitled "Desired Worlds" precisely to this new painterly tendency. In its subtitle, the show was called "The New Romanticism in Art." So-called neo-romanticism, now an established term in the history of young painting, is also one of the pillars on which Sandra Kolondam's art is based, along with realism and hyperrealism. As viewers, we can always read something familiar into the paintings, because their elements are usually taken from real life. Sometimes Sandra Kolondam has actually been face to face with the pictorial situations she depicts. That can be, but does not have to be. There are also entirely fictitious compositions that are more in keeping with the artist's world of ideas.  

Hyperreal

What is this? A kind of continuation of realism but with other means, with those that exaggerate reality. This type of painting is close to photorealism, but is not as charming as the latter; it definitely has an ironic and existentialist undertone. Its most important characteristic is the attention to detail with which things of everyday life are depicted. For example, there is the picture-filling, large bouquet of balloons from the Oktoberfest in Munich, which Kolondam staged like a trompe l'oeil painting and entitled "Make my Day". The painting shows a section of the enormously vividly painted souvenir, the central part of the picture almost moving towards the viewer, pushing forward, the composition flattening out towards the background. The balloons shine, they gleam in splendid colours and thus become precious jewels, although they are only made of plastic or rubber. And the bouquet of balloons appears monumental, it fills the picture plane, or better, since it is reproduced in a cut-out, it does not actually fit into the picture plane at all. This gives it an overly grand effect, the balloon bouquet from the Munich Oktoberfest. 

The pictorial value of the everyday

Where does Sandra Kolondam find her motifs, which she puts in oil on medium-sized or large-format canvases? In her life, her surroundings, on a walk, on a journey, at a market. There is a forest clearing, for example. The silhouettes of the trees stand as if shadowed in the sunlight, their darkness set against the light part like a drop-light shadow painting from the time of the veristic baroque - chiaroscuro is what art history calls this dramatic principle of composition. The fact that it is a clearing in the forest is only revealed on closer inspection, for the strongly cropped perspective reduces what is depicted to a kind of abstraction, were it not for a few details in the foreground that make the non-figurative figurative again - a small conundrum with reality that can be found again and again like a leitmotif in Kolondam's works. 

What do treetops look like when you stand below them, the sun is almost at its zenith and you look up? In Kolondam's work, from this perspective, tree tops are transformed into a space broken up in colour and light, reminiscent of the plein air painting of the French Impressionists. These are the treetops in the artist's field of vision.

Parallel universes

Sandra Kolondam likes to play with our ingrained visual habits. How does she do it? She creates polyperspectives on a picture that create lively situations between background and foreground. She mixes scales in her pictorial worlds that take away the real again, giving the representational and the figurative a different essence. Both thus become fictional and emphasise the artificial character of the painting. 

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An important means of achieving such effects are the properties and effects of colours and a precise, knowing or intuitive use of them. All these design principles can be seen in Kolondam's triptych "Happiness". As the title suggests, it is a cheerful picture. A young girl goes hunting with a butterfly net to capture what we know is always ephemeral "happiness". Her body is bright blue, as are the large palm trees that form the vegetative backdrop. This blue is the background colour, all other colours lie on top and create pictorial depth or proximity towards the viewer. At the very surface of the painting, lively reddish goldfish cavort. With this design, the viewer is taken on a journey through different painting levels. Will the young huntress catch happiness with her net? The question remains open.

Many of Kolondam's paintings thus play with the pictorial horizon, the view of things, the perspective. Up becomes down, big becomes small and small becomes big, the perceiving eye is led through an interplay from front to back or back again. There is much to discover, almost like in tricky trompe-l'œil painting with its fantasy landscapes and very similar playful perspectives from times past. 

Painting

Sandra Kolondam paints in oil on canvas, one of the traditional and very time-consuming painting techniques. As a rule, she does not lay out the colours of a composition beforehand, but rather creates them during the painting process by means of the actual effects of the colours and the light. She applies layers of paint finely, almost glazing them, then overpainting can follow, creating the depths of the picture. Complex, multi-figured compositions are first created in the mind and sometimes en miniature, like a cardboard as a model, to be then developed directly on the picture support. The real, the hyperreal and the parallel worlds then emerge during the actual painting. 

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