Lightning is light par excellence. It is a prerequisite for sight in nocturnal darkness. Sight, in turn, is the real subject of the painting. In a literal sense, Bettina Rave’s painting immortalizes the "Augen"-"Blick" [wordplay in German for "eye(’)s"-"view" and the word "Augenblick" (of the moment)]. Finally, Bettina Rave’s painting contains a romantic moment. Amidst the finite, she wants to let our spirits become one with the infinite. >>
Bettina Rave has found a quiet, almost meditative form for representing a fundamental problem in the fine arts: Is a work still “like nature” (Paul Klee), which is to say an invention that parallels nature, or instead, should it be considered in terms of its technical reproducibility? >>
The object before our eyes becomes an individual image for each viewer. The viewer cannot say more about the reality of a specific image than that it permits his or her relationship to this reality. Such a pictorial constitution may come from the insight that the image of reality has little in common with reality, and that the image of a landscape says little about the dominate reality of an area shown. >>
This detail quality relativizes the two central color fields in their formal self-evidence, and by the same token the self-evidence of the entire image. We have to imagine an ‘in front of it’, ‘next to it’ and ‘behind it’; the image as a focus of the here and now, simultaneous, but the entire connection expansive. A feeling of the heaviness of time becomes perceptible in these paintings. >>
