Repetitive destruction
The work of Jürgen Ots finds itself on the border between sculpture, installation, print and painting. An example is an early piece where he made a sausage out of destroyed butterfly corpses. The stuffing and the tearing apart of the butterflies incorporates a repititive action that, for the artist, represents an act of mediation. Through repeating this action a little sculpture came into being. This very sensitive piece was photographed on a black background and printed. Other objects came into play: a ball constructed out of layers of stickers and then finally cut open again, photographed and printed ("Frame (Stickerball) 2004/2008).
Later he deceided to not longer work with the prints as a medium between the photographed object and the viewer, but show the plastic object itself. Jürgen Ots started to work with these plastic in a 3dimensional way, creating installations with it (Anonymus Series (2006/2007). He constructed big walls with mostly black, but also red and blue garbage bags, foils and tapes. He wrinkled them very chaotic, stapled them together in huge curtains and burned them. He created environments with his own dark imagery. The prints becamen situations where visitors lost themselves in an intriguing visual play where you could keep on looking at. For these installations he reinvented the plastic carbage bags in a role as an entangled element in a chaotic installation. In a further step these plastics revolved into painted elements hung onto a yellow wall (Initial, 2008). This process of reinventing also happens with the prints. 750 prints were cut and altogether formed a wall (Anonymous I, 2008). An image of a martini glass was printed 750 times, wrinkled and flattened and used in an installation (Cutting Pitch, 2008). In this recent piece in the Gallery Van Ewijk Projects, Jürgen Ots starts from a huge amount of different prints of martini glasses and prints of earlier installations, all made in greyscale, folded and then flattened again with lime seed oil. By gluing them together in a pyramid relief he creates nine elements, presented inside the space as a whole and as nine pieces. The ambiguity of this work is metaphor for the viewers feeling: recognition and alienation. The tension between these poles creates fascinations.
Jürgen Ots starts from the picture, photographed and printed. These prints were reproductions of objects received through different actions. He changed the features of these plastics as a practical tool of utilisation in an abstract object of free interpretation. He made this possible by undertaking actions such as stabing, burning and rending,... One part of his work is constructed through acts of deconstructions and violation. This reminds of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana showing the backside of a painting and its actual materiality and reality by destroying it with a rend. Georges Didi-Huberman tells us that the image is best experienced s a rend. The experiment of deconstruction and violation was brought further by the works of American artist Steven Parrino. He saw these acts necessary in order to save the painting. This paradoxical action to first destroy in order to become a new way of seeing, a new layer of content is also visible in many of Jürgen Otses work. Showing how it is constructed by focussing on its materiality and process. Jürgen Ots works between deconstruction and construction. He deconstructs, violates, acts but with the idea of a final projduct. This product will become an object free for interpretation, grown out of personal choices, views and becoming general and fascinating. The alchemical acts and the acts of violation are always used in a certain repetitive structure recognizable in the final result.
It's a research on the narrative of the symbol. Andy Warhols Dead and Disaster series, where he repeated the image over and over again in order to flatten it and getting all emotion out of it, is what Jürgen Ots is doing by trying to minimalize the symbolic content of an image. By constantly repeating it and making an installation with the same pictures (nine different pictures, since the installation consists out of nine elements) what is actually topic of the image, gets dissolved. The image looses its goal of representation. It is not representing the real object anymore but finds an element of a new piece, within a new context. This way of dealing with the image is a research, through manipulation, of its boundaries. The work represents the act of recognition, in that sense that the work is a bearer for the representation of the individual subject of the viewer.
Through these repetitive actions, he actually changes the future of the actual material, making it a fascinationg object. The idea of repetition inside the works create certain structures and patrons. It looks very organic, like the texture of a tree. The texture is very important since this exists out of the human action itself. The everyday inhabits the works as starting point. Jürgen Ots creates an abstraction of the everyday, leading to the uncanny: what is recognizable and in the same time strange. Finally it becomes an object free for any kind of representation, a bearer of the subject.

Alan Quireyns