In their work Otto Kaan explore the context of images through the medium of photography. Through preliminary sketches and deliberation choices are weighed up and reflected upon until there is nothing left to chance for that one image to be created as they had imagined it. Whether that results in a necessary excursion to Morocco to be on that particular market, with those specific materials and artifacts to make that certain image, or if it’s about capturing simple objects, such as functional items or foodstuffs: everything is a result of a duration of deliberation and discarding possibilities until what remains is for them the core of the image to be made. And only then is it registered.

One of the images generated in such a way is this image: a geometrical form shaped by two surfaces, a grey surface and a three-dimensional yellow surface, in perfect balance with one another. Surfaces that have been reduced to a play of lines, but despite this, still retain their volume.

Whereby the almost fabric-like, tangible, perhaps stroke-able surfaces, reveal a softness that no longer corresponds with the original chosen object. It is not about a ‘beautiful’ image, it is not about an image with which the artist wants to make a ‘statement’, because the photographer is barely present in this image. He is present in the idea and choices, from which the result seems to flow out by its self.

Guus Kaandorp and Berend Otto, working together as Otto Kaan, want to make that image available to us, the result that provides a timeless beauty in the perfection of proportions. A post-it note block, upon a grey surface, indeed. It’s nothing more than that. But immediately it’s an image that perplexes its viewer: what should we precisely be seeing? Otto Kaan have dissected this image and offer it now to us. Not to clarify anything for us, but for us to give it a new meaning. 

Anthon Fasel