Britta von Rettberg: Caro, you once said to me, that your approach to painting is determined by time. So you're not a timeless person. What is meant by that?
Caro Jost: I was always fascinated by the idea that time and moments can ́t be captured. It's a fact that you only live in the now. Don't we all have the desire to travel in time? To preserve single moments for eternity? This is not possible in real life. In my artistic work I can give myself a response to this. So what can we do?
BvR: We take photos or collect souvenirs? And involuntarily I think of Goethe's play Faust and the legendary sentence: "Ah, linger on (moment), you are so beautiful!“
CJ: Yeah, that's pretty much the point. In short, my art is about preserving time, events and memories, to capture a moment and bring it in a new and contemporary context.
BvR: So how do you do this?
CJ: I started to create my own personal material and photo archive in New York in 1998. Over the last 22 years I have been researching and collecting what is meaningful to me, but also reflects the current zeitgeist. These can be footage, lost items or documents, which I gather in the archives of my favorite artists, but also traces and marks on the streets. In 2000 I developed my technique of the Streetprints - these are real imprints of street surfaces on canvas, my lifetime project, which I run in more than 90 cities worldwide. And of course I remember the moment when I try to made my first Streetprint in the year 2000 on Hudson / Vandam Street in front of my studio. The white material is probably still sticking to the road, would actually be great, then I too would have left my traces.
BvR: What happens to all the collected material?
CJ: I bring all these items to my studio, but it could be that I live with them for many years before I use them for a new series of work. The film about the former artists' studios of the Abstract Expressionists I immediately finished after the shooting. Now for the work series of „Public Paintings“ I used leaflets and advertising booklets which I collected on the streets and the subway in New York in the summer of 2001. These original documents have now been transferred onto canvas, painted over and are also limited in their readability by deformation of the canvas.
BvR: A lot of photos of other artists' studios, their biographies, notes and invoices lie around on tables in your studios. This already feels like time travel.
CJ: That's the wonderful thing about an art studio. You can do whatever you want here, you can leave everything lying around as you need it and you get inspiration from your own studio again and again. That's why I'm so interested in how other artists operated in their studio. It reveals so much about the artist and his work. Look, Britta, these are copies of an original invoices for paint purchased by Barnett Newman in the 1950s. In my view, these invoices documenting the near-time genesis of Newman ́s important artworks and are finds that function as means of creating artworks of my own. The resulting work series is called INVOICE PAINTING. I am very grateful to all those who have given me permission to use the papers.
BvR: The everyday materials seem insignificant, but become an artistic material for you. Each little item tells a story...
CJ: ...and is witness of it ́s time. For me, my paintings are never limited by and to the canvas. They are always multidimensional... in time and space. That ́s it, so simple.
- Caro Jost and Britta von Rettberg