English Translation by Victoria Bell
Unusual for an artist who uses color as the main object of her paintings, is Ines Hock’s involvement with drawing, and recently that involvement has increased. Pencil drawings on paper do entirely without colors besides black and white, which are seen as color by Hock. Innumerable finely-hatched lines arranged very close alongside each other build up a closed surface with strong painterly qualities. The delicate meditatively-detached way of making the strokes gives an impressive demonstration of how great a range of modulation can be attained by the most minimal handwriting-like variations possible. Although it is exactly the dark-light polarities that define the pencil drawing, its middle gray tone seen as a whole remains relatively homogeneous. This is especially true of the drawings in colored pencil. On the other hand, the drawings in colored pencil, the so-called „polychromos“ work completely differently. While in the black-and-white pencil drawings the glowing white of the ground as color effectively extends outward across the entire pictorial surface, in the polychromos a very differently-structured dark-light modulation by the colored pencil is discernible, due to its different values of brightness. Ines Hock calls these luminous color areas that break up the flatness of the picture plane „light windows“. They are responsible for a flickering that breaks through the gray tone of the drawing, and opens the flat writing-like texture into spatial depth, similarly to a flickering in the painting. Thus it is just the comparision between the pencil drawings and the gray-colored polychromos that is especially instructive. The interest in the drawing makes clear how much the focus of the painting has shifted toward the study of light.