Lichtfäden, die ins Bild hinüberwandern

The phrase “Light-threads that wander over into the picture” is an early description of photography, written at the time of it’s invention. It illustrates this new phenomenon of materializing the incidental light rays already underway to the picture as threads of Light wandering through the air. What remains unclear is exactly what happens to these threads once they reach the picture. They may wander through it, become the picture, knot or entangle themselves in it or interweave themselves within a fabric. The latter could even be interpreted as an allusion of the then emerging, and still continuing multi-facetted relations between photography and painting.

As illustration of this process of photographic exposure one could perhaps also make the comparison with spraying paint: using a spray can and a stencil to impose image on a plane surface. Besides the apparent analogies with the photogram, as with the process of photographic exposure a trigger for the spray must be manually activated. Like light that shines from a single light source, the “paint-fog” is released radialy from the nozzle of the spray-can and projects into space. The mixture of pigment, binder and gas propellant then swirls through the air until it adheres onto a picture-plane. Here a residue of the randomly structured, paint-cloud from the jet spray becomes apparent The irregular nature of the deposits seem appropriate to represent all different kinds of known surfaces and their tonal-modeling in an almost photographic manner and, seemingly, without evidence of the artistʼs hand.

In the pictures exhibited here the fine-dust paint-fog meets a whole variety of differently scaled fine and rough linens and jute fabrics. The differing thread count of their weaves creates therefore the resolution of the picture. As in a grid of pixels the particle- size of the sprayed paint, the gradients and the edges of the stencil can only become apparent as “focused” or, “out of focus”, as the warp and weft of the fabric allows.

The golden pigment which represents light particles in this model, lie now like photons on the dark ground of the black varnished fabric and then reflect real light into the viewerʼs eye. Oppositions of gradients and sharp edges, the latter produced by the masking of a stencil, allows for geometric shapes of strong three-dimensionality to arise from the depths of the dark ground and appear on the surface of the picture.

The indefinable depth of the black pictorial space and the objects that the light peels out, refer with their leitmotif of light, gold as frozen light in alchemy or the radiance of gold as the eternal light of god. This is not only in reference to those photographic and optical processes already mentioned but also to the infinite, homogeneous, virtual space of the computer, a space in which everything is constructively possible and infinitely modularly reproducible.

In the exhibition one sees not paintings, but pictures in which traces of the characteristics of photography, film, computer- graphics, painting, drawing and sculpture become visible.