"DISTURBANCES OF SURFACE - OBSERVATIONS ON DANIEL LERGON'S "IAPETUS" EXHIBITION AT KUNSTVEREIN MÖNCHENGLADBACH" BY ANDREW CANNON
In October 1671, the Italian/French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovered a moon constituted almost entirely of ice on the western side of Saturn. The moon was unique, in that it possessed both light and dark hemispheres therefore confounding Cassini when he tried to view it on Saturn’s eastern side some months later after his first sighting. It was not until over thirty years later in 1705 with the aid of a more advanced telescope that Cassini would eventually view the moon on Saturn’s eastern side.This would lead the astronomer to correctly deduce that the crater-scarred moon was tidally locked to its parent planet Saturn, always maintaining the same face towards the ringed planet. As it has circulated over time in this orbit, the silver white moon is thought to have collided with meteors from small outer moons moving in retrograde orbits. The rubble and dust from these collisions has been encountered by the satellite’s leading hemisphere that swept it up, ‘staining’ the moon’s pristine ice crust and creating what could be almost be described as a ‘dirty moon’. It is this darkly marked region that Cassini calculated as two magnitudes dimmer than the moon’s remaining brighter hemisphere and the reason why it appeared almost concealed to observations from earth. It was over more than a century later, in 1847 that a proposal was set forth by British mathematician and astronomer John Herschel1 to name the moons of Saturn after the twelve Titans found in Greek mythology2. It was then that Cassini’s lunar discovery was finally titled: Iapetus.
Daniel Lergon’s solo exhibition at Kunstverein Mönchengladbach is titled after this same very particular and unique moon, and it is not surprising that Iapetus as a subject, has orbited into the artist’s focus. Albedo – a measure of how strongly an object reflects light from its light sources, is often employed when encountering matter whose coloration transposes the full luminous spectrum, from bright to dark. It was the term albedo that was also the name of an exhibition by Lergon in 2007 at Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, where giant circular paintings faced one another, taking on the appearance of double eclipses. In one, a white cloud leaves a dark indigo crescent beneath it. In the other, almost the entire surface area is covered by a dark earth tone, whose edge leaves just a thin, bright silver half-moon shape to its left. Iapetus is a prime example of albedo, with both a bright hemisphere and a dark hemisphere, and this phenomenon has proved both highly influential and instructive in Lergon’s approach to his presentation at Kunstverein Mönchengladbach.
On entering the exhibition spaces at ground level, the visitor is confronted with a vast wall work that almost spans the entire horizontal length of the surface it is painted on. Comprised of an application of gray iron3 powder, this material is used to draw across the bare features of the wall, reminiscent of Lergon’s “Elements” show at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. There, the phrase ‘elements’ acted as a wordplay, in which the exhibition’s title implied the metallic properties employed to create the works that comprised the show. Here in the exhibition at Mönchengladbach, similar elements have been used by Lergon to mark the architecture, as an allusion is made to the stained black hemisphere of Iapetus, and of the dusty residues of its contact with cosmic debris. It is a noticeable fact that the gray iron, which in powdered form is used here to make the wall work, is also prominent in the content of meteors. There is a meteoric appearance too, to the wall drawing itself, as Lergon applies the metallic compound densely to render an obtuse, boulder like shape whose top appears to fragment energetically into gaseous form. This vapour is then depicted by Lergon’s brushwork as submitting to some manner of vacuum that sucks it left, leaving behind a dark wispy trail that extends across the entire whiteness of the wall. Beholding this dynamic work, one seems to bear witness to scenes of rapid animation, as if some material change is underway before us. We receive ideas of transition between stable and unstable states, between moisture and air, and of matter undergoing transformation from external prejudices, from temperature change to forceful pressure that transfigures objects, causing an alteration of their structure and formation. Here, Lergon’s curiosity with astrophysics becomes discernible. The vocabulary of our solar system’s inception, with its heat density and explosion, expansion and cooling and inflation and acceleration is filtered through Lergon’s mark making, in what we might understand as a gesture consolidated over time.
One fundamental part of our universe’s language concerns the birth of light and the formation of colour spectrums as a result of separation of matter. The idea that particles are involved in the creation of light brings us to the upper level of the exhibition where Lergon presents a series of paintings conducted on technologically developed retro reflective fabric. This specially manufactured material is unique in that it reflects light back to its source along a vector that is parallel to, but opposite in direction from the light’s source. Early crafts that roved the moon’s surface were precisely located throughout their journeys by having light beams pointed by control crews at retro reflectors on their chassis. Retro reflection’s properties of returning light back to its source along the same light direction, suggests ideas of positioning and relation when coming into contact with these work. However, this is not the first time Lergon has presented paintings on this choice of medium. His 2008 exhibition “States of Matter” at Andersen’s Contemporary in Berlin presented epic scale retro reflective canvases across which lacquer is painted in sinuous and searching forms. The shimmering row of five white retro reflective canvases on the upper level of the Kunstverein Mönchengladbach engage the viewer on a more intimate level. This is the bright hemisphere of the Iapetus show, where Lergon has gone about loading the surfaces of the canvases with colourless lacquer. We witness the properties of this lacquer as a site for physical occurrence, as light deflects from its solidified, translucent matter. Lergon has described the manner in which he co-ordinates the lacquer over the textile as “a dance”, giving us the idea of choreography, wherein the painter delivers a set of ‘sub movements’ to his material. The idea of ‘dancing’ also becomes incorporated in the relation of the artists to the work as a whole, with Lergon moving horizontally over the canvas, which is laid flat to the floor, reacting to the lacquer that either flows or stays static but at all times guided by the influence of light. The dynamics of the work are attributed to this action.
In his essay Painting Potentials Enframing Perception Gregory Carlock draws attention to an “Eigenraum”(literally translated as ‘own-space’) around the surface of Lergon’s paintings and the cone like shape that could be imagined to be present, from the flat face of the textile extending up to the viewer. Carlock also points out that sculpting this “volume” may seem more vital to Lergon than merely delivering work into a painted context. Certainly Daniel Lergon’s various works on textile contain within them an urge to present painting as sum of component parts and less to do with the narration of paint as a sole focus of attention. The materials themselves for example, seem to demand action from the painter. The process of applying load is one that is governed by boundaries in a similar way a laboratory researcher would first set parameters around a test, to be conducted in regulated conditions. The finely tuned relation between the nature of the load and the loaded nature of the surface becomes of critical importance. In this way the loaded surface transforms into a vehicle for colour. We should understand on a mark making level that these apparently expressive gestures are made under similar controlled conditions, under what the artist terms “non arbitrary processes”. These processes can be seen as a strategy for Lergon to minimise random actions within the work. His practice is not purely an expressive one, since there is a definitive presupposition that prevents spontaneity from occurring4. It maybe even more insightful in fact, to perceive these boundaries as ‘frontiers’, understood as edges or limits of understanding within an active area. These frontiers would then operate as demarcation lines between painted and unpainted surfaces, providing a relational space that permits us to observe a process that is defined by movement but that takes place without the loss of control. Through this, the ‘sum of component parts’ – involving density, viscosity, motion and brushwork, are brought together and unified, bestowing upon the work its identity.
If the localised area of the white paintings allow the construction of their ‘own space’ in regard to the viewer, and if the parameters applied (including the limitations of the size of textile) aid in construing a process to take place, in what ways do the rules alter when the same principles are applied directly to the walls of the exhibition space, as evident in the work on the ground floor of the Kunstverein? Here, the physical boundaries of the textile are not in place to react to the potentially arbitrary nature of mark making. Lergon’s approach is to consider his wall works in a gravitational sense, implicating a weight inherent in them. The artist has referred to the scale and horizontal formation of the metal powder paintings as having a changing effect on the architecture. He sees the sweeping compositions “curving” the interior space almost in the same way as a real eigen space is understood – that of a linear transformation of a vector space, involving stretching and compression. Relations between the nature of the load and the nature of the surface also develop further. As opposed to the textile paintings where the surface is set-up, pre-prepared, and pre-informed of the load that will engage with it, the wall surface appears definitely neutral, a usually white façade freshly painted for the purpose of exhibition. Here, the wall work functions as a painting would function but without its borders, setting out to define space without volume. Instead, its identity is bestowed through mass and grain – its density appearing within it. The construction of the Kunstverein, with its particular architectonics now becomes the frontier of the active area, within which is contained the heritage of its industrial use as well as all past languages of exhibition making. The loaded nature of the surface is more intensely charged, more socially resonant. Standing before the expansive swathes of the iron powder painting, it almost seems as if Lergon has cleverly reduced the active area to the sum of its original built materials-metal, movement, mass.
In the same way as Cassini discovered a moon that appeared visible from only one side of its orbit, so Daniel Lergon extends the theme of the ‘seen and the unseen’ to our perception of the works in the exhibition at Mönchengladbach. The viewer is only permitted to witness each hemisphere in isolation and never the entire body of the show. Lergon organises his work as poles either end of a vertical axis that dissects the split-levels of the Kunstverein’s architecture. At each of these poles we receive horizontal presentations of paintings. The dark and bright tones of space, a place where light was made possible through the initial separation of matter, are presented here with their curves and soft undulations, pulsing on memory like a distant thought, falling just short of our recollection.
The concealed and the observed, the radiant and the dark, the delicate transparency of lacquer and the heavy grime of metal powder, these contradictory elements echo the duality of the Iapetus moon. The Saturnian satellite with its seemingly mystical appearance provides us with an analogy for much that occurs as paradoxical in our own lived context. For Daniel Lergon, Iapetus represents a potent symbol for the strangeness of surfaces, and he has furthered this significance with his own selection of surfaces: the aged Kunstverein walls juxtaposed against the tightly stretched retro reflective material of his paintings. In the same way as Iapetus’s varying hemispheres reflect sunlight in contrasting manners5, so Lergon’s white retro reflective works modulate and reflect light from their taut surfaces. His wall work on the other hand, sucks light from the viewing space. The eigenraum of this wall piece is sweeping, curving, massive. The white paintings however, describe a more intimate ‘Eigenraum’ where the viewer experiences the delicateness of the paintings in a funnel-like space where light is reflected back to them in a direction opposite from the light’s source. We may almost imagine that, while fixated on one of Lergon’s white works, if we looked carefully, we would catch the feint hint of our own shadow behind us, cast by retro reflective brightness.
That our shadow or ‘umbra’, (whose original meaning was that of ghost or phantom) may at the same time provide, only in the presence of light, the evidence of our physical existence, suggests that ‘the shadowed self’6 is of underestimated importance. In fact it was the initial ‘absence’ of Iapetus on Saturn’s eastern side that forced Cassini to look further, to look into the dark and eventually discover Iapetus there, in its stained and dusty camouflage. In the same way, our search for linguistic articulation draws us naturally towards the light. It is here that our modes of expression seem to be safely at our disposal. But what of the search for a language to capture something moving between poles, transforming, ambiguous? Our cosmology, permanently in a state of movement and expansion, forces us to continually reassess our position, context and frontiers – to literally stare into the darkness. It is this coexistence of linguistic innovation and the exploration of the cosmological that together confer in attempting to establish the relation to our surroundings. That language cannot always term a condition means we are forced to develop and advance its potential. In the same way, the shadows, blind spots and dense areas of space are what urge us to look comprehensively, exhaustively forwards.
The strangeness of these cosmic questions remains curious to Lergon, who draws connections between them and the understanding of his own work. The linguistic restrictions inherent in dealing with these questions also prove of interest to the artist, who has spoken of the nature of his painting as having no “verbal equivalent”. Since the works do not refer solely to themselves, they are prevented from being delivered totally into abstraction. However, neither are they figurative. The artist refutes a simple thirst for form; moreover the works occupy an in‐between state. Their ambiguity drives us to desire physiological shape but at the same time they quietly turn away from linguistic register, remaining rather, as images without counterparts. Instead of language, it is a unification of the components in his paintings that delivers Lergon’s work with their identity and voice. Whether via viscosity and brushwork, or mass and density, the artist’s idea of a “certain uncertainty” is gradually but firmly attained in this work.
Like our relation to much of the galaxy that surrounds us, the realm of Iapetus, orbits centrally in our imagination, but as with each discovery in the cosmos, it links us to questions of light and form and the extended reaches of our universe and our outermost world. This is a world of future horizons, where light from past events has still to reach us and illuminate our present, where our language used to describe our coming into being comes up against its limits, fragmenting but developing at the same time in order to label our discoveries and put linguistic sense into our actuality. We look to the work of Daniel Lergon to lure innate forms from our unconscious background fabrics, and through instinctual leverage, within the confines of his working practice give them shape. It is in this display of works, that we tread the edge of light and matter.
1 Herschel, John (1847) Results of Astronomical Observations made at the Cape of Good Hope
2 Oceanus, Hyperion, Coeus, Cronus, Crius, Iapetus, Mnemosyne, Tethys, Theia, Phoebe, Rhea and Themis. The Titans were sisters and brothers of Cronus depicted in Roman lore by Saturn.
3 A cast iron alloy possessing a graphitic structure. The term ‘gray’ is applied due to the presence of graphite.
4 Expressionism was pre‐dated by surrealism, whose focus was directed to automatic and subconscious creation.
5 Iapetus’s forward facing side reflects just 4 percent of sunlight, with the remaining hemisphere reflecting 60 percent of sunlight.
6 “The Shadow” developed by the philosopher Carl Gustav Jung as an archetype points to everything unconscious and undeveloped within an individual human condition. “When the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict... be torn into opposing halves.” C. G. Jung, "Christ, A Symbol of the Self”, Aion, Collected Works, Volume 9/II, Para. 126, Princeton: University Press