RESEARCH

“According to some NASA research the artificial light pollution on earth grows by two per cent every year, our planet is getting constantly brighter and we risk that the light extinguishes the night.”

We live in a world that is constantly illuminated, our faces do not have shadows and day after day, hour after hour, we parade in the wake of led and displays, chasing the dreaded darkness away.
Radiant, shiny and bright are the favorite superlatives and we see ourselves as the alleged children of the light; we are the fans of the 24h millennium, the triumph of the Sol Invictus and of human predominance on nature. Nevertheless we are also a generation that gropes in the dark, a real paradox of contemporaneity. So where has the darkness gone?

We have relegated it to the long list of things we should avoid, preferring the more extrovert, festive and hyperactive brightness. It does not matter that in darkness we can see a star, that from darkness our universe exploded and that in darkness we may again find ourselves. Dark is sad, dark intimidates, dark does not produce; dark is negligible. Blinded by the atavistic fear of mystery and death we are unable to see how crucial darkness is to our survival. Darkness helps us to recollect, to distinguish, it brings us counsel and rest; in darkness we can find each other, we can get together, we are wakeful, we tell tales and listen to the memories and spirits; the soul speaks finally to man and reveals to him the weight of what he said or did not say, of what he did or did not do. In darkness remorse embraces regret, actions call for justice and we are asked to take stock; what has to stay remains and what has to go vanishes.

It does not matter if it is at the end of a day, in various phases of our life or in crucial moments of human history, darkness will always be the focal point of evolution, the transition moment in the perennial cycle of death and rebirth.

ARTIST’S INTENT

With Regenland, which I translate from the German language as “the land of the rain”, I try to name the interior imagery where this process takes place. Leaden tones and zones of penumbra characterize this emotional background without wanting to recall any melancholic, sad or nostalgic feeling. It indicates my wish to elude the glare of things in order to look elsewhere, in places where the light does not penetrate so easily. I could describe it as a ritual of exfoliation: taking off the brightest layers accrued over time in the attempt to meet darkness again, guided by the feeling that once the visible has disappeared the invisible can appear. Through this process I aim to celebrate my chaos, my inner tiny deaths; enter the cracks of my soul descending to the darkest point where light arises again.