MERISTEME | Yannick Riemer

MERISTEME

Bärbel Praun
Isabell Schulte
Ömer Faruk Kaplan
Yannick Riemer
Sophia Domagała

curated by Felix Becker

For his drawings of the series Cave Canem (Code 1) (2023), Yannick Riemer has developed his own cryptographic typeset, whose characters can mean either individual letters or entire words. On most of the sheets, individual characters are large and centred, as if they were suggesting a main theme or the title of a story. Smaller characters are distributed individually, arranged in rows or can be seen as continuous text, which is then usually overlaid in large parts by other pictorial elements. It is therefore not only the cryptographic system itself that achieves the encryption. Riemer's cryptographic writing is based in a realm that is already multi-layered and convoluted. In his pencil drawings, the artist works with transfer and carbon copy processes, which is why the works are often treated to a similar degree on both sides. Looking at the works that predate the series of drawings, Cave Canem (Codex 1) (2018), Exemplum III (2019) and (sic!)(raw) (2022), the seamless transition to a formal language of ciphers becomes apparent. Riemer's drawings can be seen as a singular vast fabric that can differentiate itself into a wide variety of contexts.