Bizarre
by Ainhoa Fernández
Portfolio review, April 2025

The use of black-and-white or heavily desaturated tones is a deliberate and effective choice in this style. This monochromatic approach also reinforces a timeless or eerie aesthetic, often associated with surrealist and performance-based photography. My favourite piece is Marta Entsagung V. The primary artistic strength of such a portfolio is its ability to evoke emotion and provoke thought through absence and subtlety. Instead of overwhelming the  viewer with visual information, the artist uses restraint: minimal props, muted or monochromatic palettes, obscured identity, and strong, simple compositions. This gives the work a quiet intensity.

 

Spectacle I
by Eugenia Durandy

Portfolio review, February 2024

"Spectacle I" resonates profoundly with me as a captivating embodiment of dichotomy and raw expression. The repurposed animal trap, discovered in the abandoned outskirts of Berlin, serves as a powerful central prop, echoing Bataille's 'Vision of Excess.' The gelatinous-silver print, adorned with French marbled paper and watercolor, evokes a tactile richness that enhances the visceral experience.
 

The nuanced dance between vulnerability and dominance in the photograph is truly mesmerizing. The woman, seemingly ensnared in the trap, challenges conventional perceptions by assuming an attacking posture, exuding both aggression and sensuality. This interplay of victimhood and dominance creates a visually poetic tension, inviting viewers to explore the complex layers of power dynamics and human emotion. The toned Selenium print adds a sublime touch, enriching the overall narrative with a timeless quality. "Spectacle I" stands as a testament to the artist's ability to evoke profound narratives within the confines of a single frame, making it an enduring favourite.

 

Film-Makers’ Cooperative: New Work 2018
by Grant Phipps
Tone Madison, November 2018
 

The Mills Folly Microcinema series returns for its second showcase of short films since its inaugural screening this summer at ALL. “Film-Makers’ Cooperative: New Work 2018” focuses exclusively on the New York-based, artist-run distributor of the exemplary avant-garde. Curated by FMC members Mary Billyou, Carolina Mandia, and Courtney Muller, this 77-minute program boasts 11 shorts of varying lengths that have all premiered in recent years.

Maybe the most intellectually stimulating here, Johnny Welch’s Sonic Intangible (2016), is a vital commentary on artistic perception and creation, which also doubles as a musical travelogue through the musical underground of London, Berlin, and Paris. Collectively, its three sections form a cohesive essay with accompanying voiceover, beginning with Max Leonard Hitchings, who characterizes the transportive power of the medium through his noisy industrial rock stage moniker Amnertia. The middle section heads to Berlin for Zoé Zanias (of Keluar)’s postulating on rhythm. The rapid-fire drum machine beats of her darkwave synthpop act’s profiled song, “Rivers,” conjure Portishead’s “Machine Gun.” Parisian musique concrète noisemaker Andy Bolus of Evil Moisture concludes this 16-minute short with further abstract ruminations on identity and intention.

 

Arcane Rhythms: Director's Lounge 2018
by Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Directors Lounge, October 2018

 

Johnny Welch, filmmaker and photographer from Sydney, Australia lives in Berlin for more than 3 years and is an active member of Labor Berlin. Since coming to Berlin, his work has become more strongly connected with the aesthetic of analog film, with the possibilities of optical printing. Even if edited and projected digitally, analog compositing seems to allow him to create a richer image of high density and depth.

Based on black and white techniques (mostly), the films seem to explore sheer blackness, instead of a black and white aesthetic. Strongly connected with punk music, dark wave and electronic noise, the filmmaker achieves a stunning quality of deep black color with his films. Experimental techniques of emulsion lifts and cracks, combined with black ink, sometimes with an additional tint of red or toning with blue, are combined with dark images of male and female characters. The driving rhythm of the sound track enhances the impression of blackness. Another connection is Aleister Crowley, a controversial figure, and a British occultist from the beginning of the 20th century who inspired a number of important artists and filmmakers like Kenneth Anger and even Fernando Pessoa. Welch’s film Aurum (super8 / digital) from 2018 is a contribution to Crowley’s Liber 777, a book related to occult or cabalistic games with numbers. For Johnny Welch, the occupation and meditation with occult theory may be a search for liberating ideas, or it may even be used as a release from the haunting personal messages once ago sent by peers. (Discharge Working I and II, 2017/18).

For the viewer, the work has an attracting, maybe haunting quality, tinted with a stunning black color. The black sun (in Aurum) for example is an amazing symbol without the need of occult references, and it is a beautiful image interwoven with blackness of painted film material that may stay in the mind of the viewer as a striking image on its own account. The artist will be present and available for Q&A after the screening.

 

Traverse Vidéo Festival 2018 Catalogue
 

Discharge Working I as endogenous footage works using shots for Sonic Intangible, from beginning 2015, with the connotation of recall and remembrance. Celluloid-film as material as well as analog / tangible post-production prove to be important in this project which focuses on the physical reality, the chance and the chaos of the celluloid medium to reflect the organic way in which the brain works with memories; those particularly which alternate and repeat.

The original Super 8 negative developed by contact print was then filmed to create speed-varying loops before lengthening them in 16mm. Moreover, this negative, including expired stock, was subsequently developed manually, resulting in some fragments of the film stuck together or deliberately badly performed bleaching to create burns and effects of textures along the film . The material was assembled in the edit, which added layers of dust and fingerprints, before a last contact print to develop the film as positive.

The soundtrack mixes optical and digital audio synchronised from a CD; the optical sound being randomly composed of buzzing, noises or scratches. As for the digital sound, it is an electronic square signal which crescendoes until it reaches a level where it resonates in the body of the spectator. The voice is a collage of cut phrases that have haunted the mind over the years.

 

Sonic Intangible

by Alessandro Violante
Fluxproject, October 2015

 

Often the best things happen in the dark, and Johnny Welch’s Sonic Intangible is one of these: it’s a documentary characterized by a strongly experimental approach in terms of montage, sound and visual practices that recall the modus operandi of the artists belonging to the historic avantgardes of the XX° century.

Sonic Intangible is a short document, that is going to be released at the end of 2015, that approaches in a particular way the so called new underground electronic sound letting three artists of this new wave talk, artists associated to the cities in which they operate and to different contexts and visual techniques. What link images, words and songs is their work’s main concept: Amnertia, Max Leonard Hitchings’s project, concentrate upon music conceived as flow in movement and as a need. The artist has the music and the music has the artist, and this is associated to a running train and to dark images of factories. The sound of the project is ambient-like, obscure, and the beats are obscure and stabbing.

Keluar operate in Berlin and put their attention upon the relationship between music, body and movement, and between the body and the sorrounding bodies within the same musical space in which they interact. At the origin of all there’s the experience, the situation in which everyone is in at a specific moment, within which music automatically makes us move, and this process of merging with what sorround us is a form of trascendence. Images, there’s no need to say it, concentrate upon bodies and portrait them in detail, showing flesh for what it is, deleting the aura that we use to build around them. Their sound is a really particular form of minimal synth that several people already know.

The british artist Evil Moisture, who has lived in France for ten years, has a more conceptual approach, incentrated upon the idea of authoring of ideas and of the creative work. This lack of property is explained as the result of the mutation made possible on the result of the creative act, that sometimes don’t make possible to recognize the original product. His sound is experimental and destructured noise and images concentrate upon filthy indoor areas and forest’s close-ups, natural elements and post-industrial landscapes.

While waiting to better going deep through the documentary with the help of the characters in the following months, we invite the reader to watch the trailer, this one already available.