Rosenstocks’s search for traces is aimed at things less high or dramatic. He is interested in the incidental, in something produced alongside an everyday movement, something out-of-the way, despised and rejected, invisibile, indeed something unlikely and unknown. His eye is directed at the hidden; he brings the shadow into light, the negative into positive. His curiosity asks about the randomly produced shape under the earth, making it into a concrete component of the visibile world. “I simply like being contradictory and ambivalent,” says Fried Rosenstock about himself.

He was born in 1943 in Kassel, as a binovular twin. But he was always dressed the same way as his non-identical brother. On the one hand, he knew his twin brother was not as like him “as two peas”. On the other, he would have been only too pleased to have himself reflected in an identical figure outside himself. His “binovular twin nature” made the artist attentive to ambivalences. Not, of course, in the sense of platitudes to the effect that everything has its good sides and its bad, and the contrary is just as true.

More in the sense of the experience that a position that sets itself up radically destroys itself and calls for its own negation, in a dialectic of statement and contradiction. That is the double bottom inside which Rosenstock finds his art. “Real art is simple and contradictory.” Without contradiction, modern art would be lacking for what it is still needed for: subversion. It is from the shadow sides, the hidden, the unknown, that we may expect the new.