"Terraforming"

64 (8x8) C-prints (digital)

titled, dated, signed and numbered (ink) on verso

The second face of Robert Zahornicky
The rumble of the Big Bang can still be heard, astrophysicists claim, referring to the background radiation that fills the universe. We want to take it away from them even though we can't hear anything.
The primordial earth, on which everything was desolate and empty, can still be seen, claims Robert Zahornicky. More than that, it lies right at our feet. Only this time it's not in good faith. Because Zahornicky photographed the beginning of time. Dozens of them. We rub our eyes in his school of vision and then we understand this apparatus genius of this artist, who converted a camera into a time machine without loosening a screw, adding a component.
With this miraculous device he literally goes down, in close contact with the earth - and we are already flying. Over grandiose landscapes, to exotic planets or even into the early history of our own celestial body, sometimes marked by a seething readiness to react, sometimes by elementary serenity.
At the end of Nostalghia, Andrej Tarkowskij demonstrated the transformation of a landscape into a small inner world. No less unforgettable is the reverse experience triggered by Zahornicky, of the erratic transformation of what lies there, of the unimportant, inconspicuous, eternally inferior in the competition for attention, into something that is so far above us, so imperiously marginalized as a mountain massif or a panorama of Mars.
So untouched and untouchable nature would still be to be found at every turn in the midst of high civilization? Certainly. But their perception is a question of the attitude of courageously falling below the normal distance. Robert Zahornicky has realized this, has seen himself in this other world, the supernatural here below.
His photos testify to the constant presence of unthinkable worlds - and a future in which, background radiation or not, at least the rumble of our destructive rage has faded away.
(Ulrich Horstmann)