Swerving

These images of various rivers, showing the surfaces and reflections of water as well

as parts of the riverbanks, elongated and distinctly cropped, are accompanied by

their titles, clippings from book IV of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura.

In this specific book the Roman author Lucretius writes in verse about the formation

of images, the process of perception and the senses in general.

Contemplating the rivers you begin to feel an uncertainty about perspective and

orientation, which creates an associative space expanding into the context

of the viewers' encounter with these works.

Thus here it is not just a photographic illusion pulling you into the depth of an image,

but breathing of a painterly suspense.

In particular this is rendered by, next to the colouring, the vagueness regarding the

works' spatial concepts: Proximity, distance and the volumes expanding forward or

backward become ambivalent, pretty much as the point of view and the vertical

orientation do. In particular, these ambiguities result from a rotated optical axis,

mostly of 180 degrees, which is not that apparent at first glance, but creates

a peculiar impact for certain.

Moreover the distinct clipping, shaping stretched horizontal formats and

releasing the motif from its local and spatial context, kind of renders the image

floating and provides it with a certain, quite welcome, indeterminacy.