Fuscum Subnigrum
(2017)
Site specific installation at the modernist building of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Computer generated anaglyph prints, video loop (8'), anaglyph glasses, Sculptures made with Super Sculpey polymer clay, citadel paint, plexiglas, ceramic, glass.
The digital surfaces in this work bore into dark backgrounds of ornaments pervaded by evil. They are lush with their own depth. The wall they push up against could be an empty screen. In physical architecture, regaining depth relies on an infusion of objects. But what if sculpture and the virtual are the same? What if the surface of things is only as deep as the things themselves? What if wildness can’t be represented anymore? And still it mutates? We distance ourselves from fear of the unknown, of getting older, of the corrupt things we do to maintain the surface. The biggest flower in the world smells like rotten flesh. Is it less disgusting to render it all in miniature? Are monsters easier to bear in 3D?
Text by Janine Armin
“Following a physical approximation, chaos would amount to depthless shadows, but the screen disengages its dark backdrop, the ”fuscum subnigrum” that, however little it differs from black, nonetheless contains all colors: the screen is like the infinitely refined machine that is the basis of Nature. From a psychic point of view, chaos would be a universal giddiness, the sum of all possible perceptions being infinitesimal or infinite minute; but the screen would extract differentials that could be integrated in ordered perceptions.”
The Fold: Leinbinz and the Baroque, Gilles Deleuze
