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Strangely enough, this difference is created by the process of repetition. Repetition is an undertaking that produces difference – and not merely since Deleuze – as Lükenwerk‘s work demonstrates. These drawings, that do nothing other than repeat their originals, are veritable difference machines. The purer the repetition, the more visible the difference. This can be seen most clearly in the drawings with the simplest motifs, e.g. that of a surface of water, a surface of pixels, three weeks in the making. What we have here is not the repetition of sameness, not identity as the product of a repetition. Conversely there is always a difference, created by a repetition: although what is repeated is something that has already taken place, the act of repetition is able to create something that is as new as an only just recovered memory.
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But Lükenwerk does not only use repetition as an artistic procedure, she also repeats particular motifs – repetitions of repetitions, as it were: hands on beach balls, people wearing goggles, clouds passing by. These repetitions certainly have a role in charging and auratising the images. They create spirals of temporality in which the accumulated time is replayed. For time is indeed stored in these drawings, which perhaps accounts for the sense of melancholy about them. Their melancholy atmosphere comes about because of all the time that has flown into them, because of all the hours someone has spent alone with them.

What is held in these time-loops of repetition is also a variation of the old vanitas motif, for the time that has entered these drawings does not in fact return, neither do the moments that they constantly re-evoke: water splashing off a beach ball, clouds changing shape, a leaf changing colour. Unique moments that are caught by, and become retrievable through, an image. But not as with a photographic image, which itself can be recorded in a moment. The time recorded in a drawing becomes retrievable through the time someone has spent with it. A printed cloud is a trivialised cloud. But a drawn repetition of this print is the cloud‘s time, rediscovered. The spiral of time arises through the uniqueness of the work‘s visual world becoming retrievable as a function of the time that has gone into it.