No.57 / N36°13'48.5'' W116°47'09.2'' 2006 / 2009

LIGHT SCULPTURES

The pictures by Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke are odes to the possibilities of photography. The pair seeks out lonely yet impressive landscapes in order to inscribe them with kinetic symbols with their small light source. The glowing circles, spirals, arches, and sparks do not seem to be from this world; however, they do not seem strange. Rather they invite us to dance with them in the desert or on the edge of a Norwegian fjord or glacier.

Just how the light painters manage to maintain a natural perspective and to write their messages in the heavens with the perfect dose of light from their lamps remains the secret of their photographic art. You cannot see them in the images because they wear black and because the long exposure time captures only the landscape, the wide skies, the stars, and the traces of light. It is important to the artist duo “to work with the landscape and not to leave any traces… The next morning it is as though we were never there.”

Their extensive work came to be through a cooperation with GEO magazine, painstakingly produced and comprehensively published. The two have been traveling for three years – to California, Lapland, Patagonia, Spain, and southern France – on the search for the exact landscapes that might offer a nighttime stage for their art. The persistence with which the pair researches the right locations for their images, called “lightmarks,” sketches out processes and camera positions, and calculates the nocturnal light conditions is impressive.

Their works are timely and clever combinations of different aesthetic strategies and elements that stem from the genres of painting and sculpture. They manage to create the impression of lightness, which distinguishes such successful works of art like the “lightmarks.”

Horst Kloever