What is the weight of light?
Through the concept of écriture corporelle the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé describes how the body itself becomes a writing movement, its limbs transformed into brushes, drawing lines into space. A fleeting script, visible only in the moment of the gesture. As soon as the body moves on, what came before begins to fade, slips from view, falls into oblivion.
And yet here, a very explicit choreography of the ephemeral remains. Bodies are absent and yet tangibly present throughout. They leave behind imprints, displacements, fragments – transcended through material, weight, and proximity. No figure fully appears, yet something remains, something that touches.
The works in this show capture moments that cannot be held. Not through assertion, but through approach. In intimate confrontations, in the limbo of subtle shifts in realities, in the imprint of a bodily gesture, a field of tension unfolds.
Bodies appear only in outlines, traces, shadows. They are not present, but they are charged. Fossils of worn clothing, the imprint of a finger on metal, intimate situations not fully told, but rather suggested – through fabric, material, and stories with a wink of familiarity.
The order of things seems displaced, deliberately thrown off. Wall structures hold not objects, but glimpses into personal realities. Metal appears delicate. Wood recalls flesh. Everything carries a certain tension, though not one of open confrontation.
The bodies that circle these works appear only at the margins. As shadows, as imprints, as afterimages, as ephemera. And yet they are present throughout. In the shape of a discarded garment, in the (im)print of feet on wood, in the gap between frame and canvas that reveals more than it conceals. These are traces of contact and absence alike, conveying a closeness that is not merely pleasant.
Tension lies not on the surface, but deep within. In the way an object holds itself in space. In materials that appear soft and yet are rigid, or hard and yet fragile. Provocation is not expressed through loud gestures. It lies in intimacy itself, in the fact that something unspoken is nevertheless shared. That the gaze is confronted with something not meant for it. That the private leaves its protected space and exposes itself to unfamiliar eyes, without explanation.
The works circle each other like fragments of a story that cannot be told linearly. What connects them is not a narrative, but a mood – a certain tension in the light, a shift within the everyday.
What, then, is the weight of light? Perhaps it is this: the subtle pressure left behind by a gaze. The moment something becomes visible without ever fully revealing itself. The trace of a contact that language cannot contain.
(Text by Carla Veit)