ZERO SOLARIS
Cologne, 2nd October, 2010
Dear Esther,
[…] With your painting “I want it”, at first I felt a bit like a David Bowie fan in the Seventies, when every album was so different from the one before that you had to get used to the new each time. I was accustomed to the nightly images with cars, and to the gas station (which as a print has been on my home’s wall for many years), but I was not prepared for an image with no car and nothing reminding of humans.
Still, there is, of course, an evident and logical development: the limousines have disappeared into the night, but their phantom is all the more perceptible in the landscape. The nightscape for me is highly charged with a kind of metallic energy.
This is an exciting transformation, which also reminds of Science Fiction. “Solaris,” the novel by Stanislav Lem, is about this giant ocean, which a team of researchers are exploring because they believe it to be an intelligent creature, but without the least result. The nature of this intelligence is never revealed, the secret maintained.
What remains is the impression of an “intelligent acting landscape,” a collimated energy, which however cannot be identified as either good or bad because these categories do not capture the phenomenon. “I want it” conveys a similar impression to me. […]