Bringing William Engelen and Jorinde Voigt together in one exhibition is something
that is obvious yet also surprising. Although their works seem to have something
in common at first glance, their artistic approach in fact differs in many aspects.
However, the common aspect is one of the processes focused on by the exhibition, Drawing
a Universe: the transition from one level to another. Transformations of work phases,
materials, media, images and sounds, the senses and imagination. Engelen is a fine artist
and a composer. His interdisciplinary work oscillates between music score, performance,
show, sculpture and installation. Voigt works with the media of drawing, collage and installation.
Both artists use notations and diagrams as a representational means, although
in different ways. Since the end of the 20th century, there has been a ‘boom’ in methods that
enable artists to make the networked present perceivable in all its complexity and wealth
of information. Charts, models, designs, notes, design drawings, cartography, algorithms
and graphic music scores have become new fields of research within an autonomous genre
entitled diagrammatics. According to Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, “behind the increased interest
in diagrammatic, realistic pictures there has always been a subconscious need for
structure in the form of factual visibility. In view of the huge amounts of data [...] a diagram
suggests ‘this sudden overview’, which has increasingly been questioned due to the accelerating
changes in the world of data.”1 One could suppose that notations and diagrams are
based simply on calculation and pure objectivity. However, new artistic fields of research
can be accessed once they are freed of this pretence. “Notation contains the certainty of
an objective, visual, mathematic specification and at the same time the uncertainty of an
intellectual reprogramming, the recreation of something else that is mobile, adjustable, unexpected”2,
according to Michel Frizot. John Rajchman emphasises that the art of notation
does not only lie in simply making the invisible, visible but much more in making what was
previously inconceivable, conceivable. “It is only then that notation becomes artistic, philosophical.
No longer satisfied with content that simply records the codes of a medium or the
rules of a language, notation is used to outline new categories of thought, to explore and
disclose them.”3 Engelen and Voigt do precisely this: they have discovered individual forms
of notations and diagrams, which incorporate their perception, emotion and experience. It
is this subjective aspect in particular that is emphasised in current studies on the theme of
diagrammatics. Susanne Leeb states: “Nevertheless, diagrams in art deal with relationships
and forms of classification. Hence the big question posed by many artists working with diagrams
is how does each individual stand in relation to the cosmos, the world, society and
other people – and is hence a question of subjectivity.