There is always a notebook on the desk of Jochen Gerner’s studio.
He draws in it only when he is on the phone, with what he is holding when the phone rings, or anything at hand when he makes the call.
The drawings, according to this protocol, are characteristic. Indeed he only discovers their shapes at the end of the conversation: they are both utterly personal and utterly uncontrolled. His hand draws, but his mind is elsewhere.
It is therefore a kind of subliminal diary, in which nothing would precisely be told or dated, but where the artist compiles the lists of things he has seen, which shows his interest in the outer and contemporary world, and at the same time reveals his inner world recreated erratically.
After En Ligne(s) (L’Ampoule 2003) and Branchages (L’Association 2009), Jochen Gerner gives us a new notebook of drawings while on the phone: Atelier (L’Association 2020) drawn from 2008 to 2019, that is to say ten years of conversations.
On this occasion, a new edition of the book Branchages, out of print for several years, has just been published.