In the exhibition title already, Kotscha Reist refers to the open meaning of his pictures, to “something” that is expressed “in something”: Be it the motifs that experience a certain expression “in” the pictures; be it this expression that evokes our own images and associations in us as viewers. “Something” are also the hints, the foreboding of the stories that he shows us with his objective, but not just figurative painting, and finally the varied references and back-references of the motifs and the painting itself. With the most recent pictures, Kotscha Reist is using a new method by first taping off the subjects and certain picture elements on the canvas. Then he paints the background and at the end the recessed areas. In this way, these appear sometimes more painterly, sometimes more drawn, and in places they rise up like the fine relief of an imprint. In doing so, he expands the creative repertoire and the reflection on it as well as on the image content and its appearance on the canvas.

Kotscha Reist always starts from concrete, thus everyday subjects: people, animals, plants, objects, architectures, scenes in the interior and exterior; often fragmentary, sometimes recurring like the poppy plant, a tent or certain birds. He works from templates, which can be texts and stories as well as pictures or photographs; own and found recordings from the media or the Internet. Not infrequently he moves apparently incidental events and side scenes into the center of the proceedings, whereby the motifs and picture titles do not result in a clearly coherent story: the hem of a curtain (‘Snow white’), the corner of a table or the gait of a cat (walking by). Rather, they evoke individual stories which, when taken together, may form an approach to a collective memory, but in the ambiguous sense of this implied something. References to models from art history, to other artists, or to his own pictures, which Kotscha Reist ‘re-enacts’ variously in more recent works, are also associated with the phenomenon of the afterimage (‹Heritage 5›; ‹Comptoir de Mystique ›): A kind of afterglow like in the picture‹ After the show ›, whereupon the contours of the last picture of a slide projection – the figure of a skier – are barely recognizable. In the momentary nature of Kotscha Reist’s pictures, presence and absence, the presentness of the moment and its transience appear simultaneously to a certain extent. The often light-toned and rather fine, but no less significant painting style goes hand in hand with this ambivalence between appearing and fading and brings the pictures back, as it were, from the past and memory into a presence of appearance.

By means of his painting, Kotscha Reist repeatedly removes the motifs from their context, decodes them and presents them to us as novel picture compositions. Sometimes they are covered by fine lines or lattice structures that are reminiscent of window bars or the grid of a camera-razor. The grids – as well as the different colored dots and the dark frames on other pictures – clarify the distance between the original and the image and locate our point of view as a beholder outside the picture (‹Bikini›; ‹Die Betrachtung ›; ‹ Girl with dots ›). In a certain way, Kotscha Reist’s pictures become projection surfaces and picture stages for constantly new performances of motifs in a lively interplay with his painting.

Marc Munter, 2021