Dagmar Travner

Shades / Shapes – Scratches in Light

Concerning the 30 Jears Jubilee Exhibition „Light & Shade“ of the Gallery arcade
 

At the beginnings of fine art we find a story passed on by Pliny: the potter Butades’ daughter faithfully traced the outline of her sleeping lover’s shadow, cast on the wall by the light of a lamp. As he then fell in battle her father bestowed the shadowy outline with a clay body – thus the first sculpture was created from the ε̉ίδωλον, illusion, silhouette, likeness. A form steps forth from the wall – the shadow is sketched by the artist with deft strokes. Can a picture, an image ever catch the original form, hold it captive? The form disappears behind the image, can never completely reflect the object of artistic desire. The picture will always remain a shadowy projection, never attaining the status of the original. And this shadow-entity exists only as a delusion, stays captive in the underworld.

Shadow Worlds
 

Regina Hadraba draws her own personal silhouette from the wall, the Corner, before her, painting upright and erect. In the meantime a figure cowers, on the back of her both sides painted work, not yet unfolded, not developed – in embryonic posture. In Plato’s myth of the cave, shadows are symbolised as being perceived images of unrecognisable archetypes or ideas. What might these look like, if we are only aware of their shadows and seek to retain these in our inadequate images? And even if we succeed in freeing ourselves from our bonds, in turning away from the wall of shadows and looking outwards beyond the glare, out of the cavern, towards the sun, we will initially be unable to perceive anything except diffuse phantoms in radiant light. The glistening light produces no immediate new knowledge, quite the opposite: it blinds. In the first instance one sees less than was perceived from the shadowy forms. Slowly, step by step, we learn to see anew – can one ever go back? To conclude the link from the silhouette to the archetype? The perceived image is merely a shadow. Karl Grabner takes up this ambiguity between archetype and image as the theme of his endeavours. A sequence of pictorial images reaches out from the chaos of incomplete strokes, colours, surfaces, shadows, searching for the archetype to give form to the concept. Andrea Schnell draws on the idea of an other artist, the picture of a Rodin sculpture, and invites the observer to search for the resulting new realisation in overlayered strokes, in hidden shadows.
Still to-day, just in this transition to virtual worlds, Plato’s Myth of the Cave can be transferred to our present day dwelling places; we look out at the world through windows, from which light forces it’s way in to us and falls on the furnishings. We sometimes see ourselves in reflective surfaces, the light is amplified by reflection, shapes and objects produce strange shadows. For the observer the view becomes subjectivised by unusual reflections, by illuminated rosettes, by light refraction. From the painting – in Lacan’s perspective of light, consisting of gazes and marks – the aquarium (or Lacan’s proverbial sardine can), inundated with light, looks at me, it looks at the artist, painting his picture, looks at the onlooker out of the picture: “Ça me regarde”. It touches me. The light, a reflection approaches me, deposits a first impression on the retina and numerous after-images in my thoughts. Richard Jurtitsch creates pictures with innumerable visual echoes, reflections, rosette-like shadow images as refraction of the simple plane of observation. A further subjectivation of the displayed matter is generated by obstructions which distort the view: glasses, shadows, fences, childishly held hands in front of the eyes (of the camera); the sunlight, the world outside penetrates our consciousness only partially. Will I still be seen if I hold my hands in front of my face, like this? Will I sometimes look through my fingers, or chase shadows? “Too much light dazzles us” (Pascal) on leaving the cavern, first shapes become merely perceivable through shading. Flora Zimmeter plays Einschauen (Hide and Seek) in her photo series. The shaded view from the lens on sun drenched objects, which is elucidated through the camera and generates subjectivity in this apparently so “objective” medium. The illusion, which a shadow projected on a wall can convey, continually fascinates: nothing can be so manipulated as a silhouette. How does the object really look, which casts the shadow? An object can cast different shadows – but can variously formed objects cast similar shadows?

Shadow-light

Small hands become dangerous crocodiles or frightened rabbits. Can one catch one’s own shadow, can one lose it, how can we double it? When children play with their shadows, they jump and grab, they shape and shelter. Chasing shadows. Creating something new through finger dexterity, shadow games, shadow theatre. Manipulated silhouettes on a movable screen. Again archetypes – of the theatre. Kerstin Cmelka revives the art of the shadow theatre with still photographs in old frames.
One cannot escape from one’s shadow side, the polarity of light and dark, day and night, good and evil, as the Chinese story by Tschuang-tse so vividly relates: a man who wanted to escape from his shadow, ran and ran until he fell down dead. But why did he not simply stop, sit down for a moment to catch his breath under a tree? In that way the mighty shadow of the tree would have freed him from his own shadow! “I am the shadow of myself”, says Robert Swoboda; the child in the artist manifests itself in his shadow – or the other way around. Play with the divergences between object and silhouette. The shadow cast is not identical to the illuminated object – the beaming child has grown up in its own shadow. But doesn’t every object have a light and a shade side, and which actually casts the shadow? “Where there is much light the shadows are deepest”, said Goethe through Götz. Coloured shadows for example. As he demonstrated in his Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours): an object in moon- and candlelight casts two differently coloured shadows, namely one orange and one blue, in different directions. But in our perception the opposite is also valid, that means light needs shadow, night, darkness to be discernible. On the other hand the eye can only see with the aid of light... And if the light consists of shadows or dark expanses of colour? Slides? If the light exists in the form of images, and these projections – if they are literally projections – do not fall on a white screen, but rather on human beings?

The projection looks at me and I want to close it’s eyes. It should not look at me, with it’s outsize eyes, this projection, which has been thrown onto me, it should not catch sight of me in my smock...

Petra Buchegger, seen from behind, tries to shut the eyes of the model with her index fingers, and thereby thematize seeing and being seen. Innumerable gazes are directed at the subject; the world consists of alien gazes, marks on the surface of the picture, and everybody is completely alone with his own pair of eyes. The image results from photographing the superimposing of slide projection on the object; light and the fall of shadow from the projection, light itself exists as an image – the continuation of the Myth of the Cave. Which “reality”, which cognisance is behind this many layered image? For Brigitte Pamperl the representation of to-day’s world is redefined in barcodes; in her work Light + Barcodes = 128, the visitors become a constituent part of the silhouette, a projection upon a barcode, through the medium of a surveillance camera. We encounter light as a metaphor of knowledge, with the vulnerable, organically weaving Tendril (Ranke) from Elisabeth Weissensteiner. A body of light from handmade paper, which makes light visible in all it’s facets, through transparency and opaqueness with fine ramificated structures. The polarity of the metaphorical light and shade is articulated by means of a rusty wire mesh attached to the climbing tendril.
Shadow projection in various dimensions. Babsi Daum displays a minimalistic work, composed of corrugated paper, out of which coloured transparent plastic confetti protrudes, just enough so that tiny semicircular projections, mini-shadow discs can appear on the picture surface. Helga Cmelka emerges out of the two-dimensional using parallel planes, just sufficient to permit the forms, drawn with needle and thread, to cast their own shadows; sunlight as the perfect condition to accentuate the filigree shadow structure of the embroidered gossamer. Brigitte Lang, on the other hand, presents a three dimensional shadow game from her series Das Leben ist ein Spiel (Life is a Game). On a stake with pieces of wood bound onto it, human forms can be turned, thereby producing moving shadows in different combinations. The circling motion creates in itself stroboscopic effects of light and shade, which become moving pictures; the prime origins of film, illusions, ε̉ίδωλα of our perception.

Shadow Domains

Waltraud Palme’s silhouette-like photographic work contains a light and shade polarisation per se. The photograms colour the light on the paper black, while the depicted object leaves a bright silhouette, rich in shadows, partially transparent outlines. Erich Steininger’s preoccupation with light and shade originates from the fundamental nature of the wood cut as a medium. The graphic representation of the dusky structures are intensified and resolved into pure Schattenfelder (Shadow Domains). He produces a “blackening” effect by printing in layers with several plates, one on top of the other: predominant, the shadows devour the light until only the faintest points of light are left visible in the black regions. In this moment the nocturnal motive retreats into the background, while the solitary spots of light assume form. Georg Lebzelter takes a different approach. In the first etchings, from the cycle Schlachten (Slaughter), cattle carcasses mutate with increasing darkness into an unyielding hill landscape. Valleys and gorges are generated, slopes, crevices, ravines, mountain streams. With water, light returns into the pictures through reflections, through the play of light. The further development evolving from this stands somewhat in contrast. In the series Lichten (Clearing), a light horizon gradually transforms into bright visions in the sky, over a wide desert. “Earth juts through the world... only so far as truth happens, as the primal conflict between clearing and concealing.” Heidegger’s quotation, concerning the concealment and the setting-forth of light as a metaphor for truth and cognisance, could well be seen as the caption for these etchings. The graphic artist Henriette Leinfellner works with imaginary maps, shows new manifestations of the Earth. The shadow of a cloud spreads itself over the landscape. The sun is shaded off. The earth-shadow is nevertheless swifter, it catches up with the cloud shadow and swallows it. The light conditions change themselves in Lothar Bruckmeier’s painting Landschaft mit Wolke (Landscape with Cloud) just as the patches of sunlight in the clouded sky race over the countryside, whereas, in Alfred Bachlehner’s seascape, dark fish surround – or worship? – a bright sun-lemon. So here we sit, in the shadows of an Italian pergola and look forward to fresh sardines in lemon sauce. Time flows over the landscape, fleet cloud shadows drift by, above us. Already the shadows are becoming elongated. In the south the dusk will rapidly change to night, whereas in our latitude (Mödling) the shadow threshold revolves more slowly over the earth – with 1116 km/h; Gerlinde Thuma takes the shadow of the night itself as a motive for her diptychs and shows its movement through juxtapositioned half-pictures. The shadow on the horizon of the day-night boundary. The vertical formulation depicts the function of the shadow in time. Or, seen from outer space, it could be considered as the shadow running over it’s expiry date. The transition from light to shade is sketched with deft strokes. The metaphorical interpretation of the concept of time in the fluent language of light and shade, day and night – pure polarity.

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