Memories are often projected onto tangible items such as photographs with the notion of trying to recollect a certain moment in time with the consequence that the records of experiences are replacing the experience itself.
In his Matter and Memory (1896) Henri Bergson was the first to distinguish two types of memory: habit memory and image memory whereby the latter is thought of as any form of representation like visualization which is usually termed recollection. Merleau-Ponty later argued that the only way to remain true to the ambiguities of memory is to refrain from posing the problem in terms of representation.
Tatjana Danneberg’s faces, shoes, dress, suit could be read as traces of fleeting fragments of memories coming into appearance in a ghostly manner on her paintings which don’t seem to be an image yet. They rather seem to be caught up in a transcendental stage oscillating somewhere between body and image memory. The fleeting glance of a landscape that accentuates the duration of time while passing by it in “Arrivederci” where objects are receding into the distance and diminishing in clarity just like memory does.
Memory consists of multiple layers just as the ghostly paint on Tatjana’s canvases. The subject-matter here is not “original” in an ontological sense of the painting itself but are traces from other images or fragments painted or printed priory on another medium which are then transferred onto the canvas. The final painting is hence an accumulation of traces of prior images or gestures that bear a historical dimension.
The inverse process is applied to “Untitled” where the layers of paper residing on the plastic foil are traces of the attempt to dissolve a single sheet of paper. Here the traces act as the different layers of the paper’s memory again withholding to render an image of it. This is also true for the glass vessels that, once mounted together, could act as a transparent frame to capture fleeting moments. By infusing them with different perfume scents the artists here emphasizes on the “essence of the past” that comes into being as an involuntary memory.
Just as Proust tries to conserve memory in his meticulously detailed descriptions in La Recherche Du Temps Perdu in order to capture the past in the artwork, Danneberg seems to refuse to provide an intact image of something that could be a joyful vacation memory. As objects are receding into the distance and diminishing in clarity, so do the ghostly images appearing in her paintings of a once lived moment sticking true to the ambiguities of memory.

Courtesy of the Artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

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