These fables which I shall call mythical - for they adopt the language of myth and tell of legendary events, even if fictional and entirely invented by the artist - help Jochen Gerz to surmount a major difficulty: to express our wayward culture with the very words that made this waywardness possible. “… his mechanical interest in language at the very time of writing had come in between like a memory or a dam: as if everything that went beyond this interest, all relations with a “history”, however brief, were like a lack of attention…” Gerz says in Agnes ou le Temps français, a work parallel to the mythical accounts. These works, as poetry, provide him with a liberty of expression that frees him from preoccupation with rational linguistic meaning and enable him to stay the closest possible to this “espace du vécu” he has always sought.

Anne Dagbert 1986

...Jochen Gerz’ verbal images often work with time-related metaphors of contemporary astrophysics for example. They like to use paradox. The melancholic undertone of the overall context arises out of the realisation of some kind of futility of determining the things around us, as well as the exact opposite: the impossibility of not wanting to do so.

Lucie Schauer 1985. Translated by e_CR editors.

…Es geht um Kunstwerk und Urheber, sowie um die Erkenntnisfähigkeit von beidem, zweitens um die Rivalität von Zeit und Zeitlosigkeit und schließlich um die Möglichkeit von Bild und Sprache selbst. … Die sprachlichen Bilder von Jochen Gerz arbeiten häufig mit zeitbezogenen Metaphern, zum Beispiel aus der Astrophysik der Gegenwart, sie bedienen sich gern der Paradoxie. Der melancholische Unterton des Gesamtkontexts rührt sowohl aus der Einsicht einer Art von Vergeblichkeit, die Dinge um uns herum dingfest machen zu können, wie dem genauen Gegenteil: der Unmöglichkeit, dies nicht zu wollen.

Lucie Schauer 1985