The starting point for Gerhard Langenfeld’s work Neckarbilder (Neckar Pictures) is the mirror sheen of the monochrome black enamel coat covering the roundels and its reflective properties.
Placing the roundels on an easel in the open air, the artist photographs the reflection of the landscape, making sure to do so from the side so as not to be in the picture himself. With the help of image processing software, he subsequently de-skews and de-warps the image to restore the familiar orientation. The shallow dents in the paint create blurred areas in the photograph that invest the image with a painterly quality and recall famous works from the history of art. These manipulated photographs of the painterly-looking reflections are mounted on round panels of the same size as the original “mirror” and shown alongside each other as a diptych, so that action and reaction are united.
This bipartite presentation alludes to the genesis of the individual works and to the conceptual character of the Black Magic series, of which they form a part. |
