11

pigmentbased inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Ultra Smooth

signed and dated on verso

As in my previous projects, this work also focuses on two central themes.
The first is the view of and into creative natural processes, the turning towards and perception of our surroundings. Nature and the environment are not perceived as positions facing us, but as a sphere surrounding us in which everything relates to each other and acts.
In this awareness, an individual pictorial process is developed with which nature and the environment are directly experienced and reflected upon. Media-reflexive considerations are negotiated with the questioning of traditional image processes and a reorganisation of the relationship between author, device and image.
The first attempts at this new work emerged from a deep need to touch things. The hegemonic culture of seeing is broken in CON-TACTO with the activation of the other sense organs. With touch, an act that focuses on the tactile is brought into focus. Only objects that can really be reached at arm's length become image objects. It is not the distanced ocularcentric view from a distance – as is usually the case in photographic processes – that is practised here; rather, a scanner is used in this work, carefully groping, in direct contact with the pictorial objects. This very primitive commercial document scanner is rebuilt and modified by me and thus extended by important control possibilities.
The clearly visible peculiarities in the images arise in the scanning process itself.
The unevenness on the surfaces of the image objects and simply my own physical inability as well as irregularities in the manual scanning process show up in recorded image parts and irregular proportions. Furthermore, the technique used here – deliberately simple – is very reduced in its technical possibilities. The image depth of field is extremely low and due to the low resolution, artefacts occur again and again.
The technique used and my own actions only allow for images that are possible in the interplay of technology, man and nature. The resulting images are far removed from attempts to be a real image. Nature and our environment only form the templates for the pictorial world of this work and often the actual origins of the pictures are no longer – or only slightly – recognisable. Once again we recognise the limitations of forming an image of nature and the environment.
(Edgar Lissel, Vienna, April 2022)