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Dario Rutigliano: (ARTiculAction) interviewing Immo Jalass
Dario Rutigliano: (1) Hello Immo, and a warm welcome to ARTiculAction. I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? By the way, what could be in your opinion the features that mark an artwork as a piece of Contemporary Art?
Immo: My definition of an art work in general combines the criteria Idea, Object/subject and techniques in it's quality while contemporary art is always spacetime bound, the space time it was or is made in.
Dario Rutigliano: (2) As a basically self-taught artist, what did you find to be the biggest challenges to improving your work through the years of your long career? In particular, are there any experience that has impacted on you and on your development as an artist?
Immo: The missing of my father in the first 8 years because of the beginning of world war 2 that caused a now slowly ending for some kinds of distortions, my drawing works at school, my attempts to find my right way in a world of hopeless desease. Meeting the painter Jens Cords in Hamburg who impressed me with his acribic handling of the oil colors in nature studies. Amsterdam 1969 when I was working as an Art instructor for the Famous Artits School that opened some new ways to draw and paint while explaining what and how to do so.
Dario Rutigliano: (3) By the way, what particular artists, if any, did influence you during your early years of painting and how did you first come across their work?
Immo: Reading and studying books about Leonardo da Vinci, Hercules Seeghers one of Rembrandt van Rijn's teachers, Paul Cezanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Klee, Giacometti, Oskar Kokoschka, later Francis Bacon and many others. Corneille and Martin Kippenberger I met personally. Some of them in the Kunsthalle Hamburg.
Dario Rutigliano: (4) Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?
Immo: In my early years (round about at the age of 18 I was sitting together with a school friend outside on the meadows drawing the landscapes with pencil, color pencil and ink. I did linol cuts associating natural impressions. At my 21th birthday I got an oil color set and started with natural impressions ranging from landscape views to plant structures under the microscope that fascinated me. Later I went to Sweden and made some scetches here and there. 1962 I first travelled to the Netherlands (Dordrecht) sitting outside in the lands making series of ink drawings on paper.
Dario Rutigliano: (5) Now let's focus on your art production: I would start from Evelyn and Imageproof that our readers have already started to admire in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit your website directly at http://galeriejalass.tripod.com in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production ... In the meanwhile, would you like to tell us something about the genesis of these pieces? What was your initial inspiration?
Immo: Living alone on Ibiza (Spain) in the years 1965 – 1968 at the age of 27 I made drawings (scetches) from posing girl friends that I had met there. This pencil scetches formed the base I was working out later in oil on canvas while keeping their personality in mind (Evelyn has originally been one of them drawn on paper with pencil, color pencil and ink.) Later I photographed this drawing/s and worked it/them out with Photoshop (over expressing “Evelyn” being in great fear of the dentist). “Imageproof” is based on a photo of myself that went through many stages of sizing and resizing, color changes, copying another picture in transparent modus into it, setting slight corrections here and there, again some color corrections until I was somewhat satisfied with the expression of myself as taking up a kind of imprint from my surroundings.
Dario Rutigliano: (6) Multidisciplinarity is a crucial feature of your artistic approach: in particular, in these years you have dedicated yourself to Computer Art and I have highly appreciated the effective synergy between different materials and techniques that you have been capable of establishing by replacing the easel with a computer monitor and the palette of oil colors with digital graphics programs... while crossing the borders of different techinques have you ever happened to realize that a synergy between different techniques is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts, especially in modern times?
Immo: Read the full interview at http://galeriejalass.tripod.com/interviewed.htm
Dario Rutigliano http://articulaction.yolasite.com/