ECLIPSE
since 2007 (ongoing)

1. ECLIPSE
"Nichts gleicht meinem Glücke” (after Thomas Mann)

2. ECLIPSE
“Like Virginity, once lost ” (for Roger Casement)

3. ECLIPSE
"Dieu" (after Samuel Beckett)

4. ECLIPSE
"Evolution" (after 1967)

ongoing



„Oysters, lemon pulp, heavy goblets full of dark wine, long clay pipes, gleaming chestnuts, pottery, tarnished metal cups, three grape seeds – what can be the justification of such an assemblage if not to lubricate man’s gaze amid his domain, to facilitate his daily business among objects whose riddle is dissolved and which are no longer anything but easy surfaces?“
Roland Barthes „The World as Object“ in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, ed. Norman Bryson, Cambridge 1988, S.108
(on seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting)

A convex stainless steel calotte with bright light in the back is positioned on a wall with some distance, creating a circular colored light field in the surrounding area. Words are cut out of the steel, allowing to look through the material onto the space behind it. The light in the object colors the wall creating the visual impression of endless depth making it almost impossible to actually perceive the wall. The extremely shiny surface of the convex polished stainless steel - in conjunction with black piano lacquer - mirrors the encompassing space distorted, displaying the room to an extended estranging visibility like in a gravitation field while the color radiating light taking in the objects in its range.

The ECLIPSE-Series is as much an abstract work as it is figurative. The project combines text elements and light in a mirror object with references to Jan Van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Wedding”, classical mirrors of the 15th to 17th century, and the visual metaphor of an Eclipse (as Occultation or Occlusion), creating “masks” and structural layers of perception and representation that relate to the cultural discourse of fetishism, the object of desire and the notion of the Other in late capitalist society.
"An eclipse (ancient Greek noun (ékleipsis), from verb (ekleíp) -"I vanish"-) is an astronomical event that occurs when one celestial object moves into the shadow of another. The term is most often used to describe either a solar eclipse, when the Moon's shadow crosses the Earth's surface, or a lunar eclipse, when the Moon moves into the shadow of the Earth. A solar eclipse is actually a misnomer; the phenomenon is more correctly described as an occultation. An occultation is an event that occurs when one object is hidden by another object that passes between it and the observer. The word can also be used in a general sense to describe when an object in the foreground occults (covers up) objects in the background in a dynamic way as the scene changes." (Extracts from Wikipedia)
Technical aspect:
Special polished stainless steel was cut into a circular blank and then pressed into a convex form. The writing was digitally laser-millcut into the steel calotte, finally LED lights with alterable colors are built into the back of the convex mirror which is placed 5 cm from the wall. The used words of the writing were digitally composed of handwritten manuscript fragments of the chosen authors. Sometimes the phrase doesn’t exist in handwriting form anymore (e.g. Thomas Mann) or is entirely fictitious (e.g. Roger Casement).