The Weight Between “Can the study of fleeting images be a subject?” This question is posed by Gaston Bachelard, philosopher of science and cataloger of the different ways the elements – earth, water, fire, air – fertilize our imaginations and implant themselves in our dreams. Blue skies, wings, rising clouds, wind and nebulae: these, for Bachelard, constitute the “aerial imagination,” his category of poetic images that deal with air as their guiding element. The materials that make up this category do not lend themselves to figuration – air, wind, and light are hard to fix into a frame. Part of the problem, as Bachelard observes, is that these substances are defined by their mobility, always on the verge of being tipped into a different state. “Images of aerial imagination either evaporate or crystallize,” he writes.

The works in this exhibition, in widely varying ways, propose answers to our opening question. Rana Begum’s Mesh appears to be suspended between evaporating and crystallizing, as a cloud of galvanized steel hangs in the air, seemingly weightless. In her Louvre works, painted glass panes echo the movement of light across a window, filtered through translucent blinds. Here, industrial materials are made to contain the residue of fleeting effects: in Begum’s works, these effects are atmospheric; in Lukas Heerich’s Glocke, sonic. An absence of sound hovers around the fallen bell’s form, as what should be a resonating body soaring through air is muted by rubber – heavy, insulating, absorbent.

Selected Works (11 images)

Chryssa devoted much of her career to the “study of fleeting images.” Arriving in New York from Greece in 1955, she was spellbound by the fluorescent lights of Times Square, as well as the stream of words and images that adorned advertising signage. In the sculpture shown here, the city’s fluctuating neon landscape is distilled into a hieroglyph of light and darkness. Monty Richthofen’s installation works with similar material: light, dark, language in motion. Words pulse in and out of obscurity to the rhythm of Richthofen’s voice, and text teeters between legible script and its dissolution into blots of ink; between crystallizing into meaning or evaporating into uncertainty. Light and dark become modular components in works by Richard Serra and Rudolf Széchenyi. In Serra’s Horizontal Reversal VIII, ground oil stick, carefully applied in slow-drying layers over multiple weeks, takes on the texture of softened tarmac. As the viscous darkness absorbs light, it appears to gather mass; suddenly, the conventional opposition between volume and two-dimensionality no longer seems like a given.

Serra is known for leading his viewer’s attention to the act of seeing. What does it mean to feel the weight of a drawing in your body? How does placing black next to white on a page change the light in the room? Emanuel de Carvalho’s work takes up related questions. He, like Serra, is invested in the way cognition and embodiment work together to condition the way we receive the world around us. From afar, the slate-black steel columns of lack sum appear as monoliths; move closer, and the sculpture functions like a pair of impossible watchtowers, with openings that suggest something looking out from within. For both Serra and Carvalho, the mechanics of sight – the processes by which we receive “fleeting images” – is the subject.

Installation Views (6 images)

In his own way, James Prapaithong shares this preoccupation with the subjective conditions of seeing. His light-flecked works register the impact of brightness on the retina, showing skies filtered through the haze of an eye squinting against the sun. The expansive works of Harminder Judge also take natural light as their subject, where monolithic forms emanating with colour recall seething horizons. Judge achieves this with a distinctly tactile process, layering pigments into pools of wet plaster, sanding, polishing and oiling until shapes reveal themselves over time. Magdalena Skupinska, meanwhile, works exclusively with natural pigments, imprinting her canvases with the sediment of organic matter. Earth, light, the effects of oxygen or heat on minerals: these elemental materials and processes are the subjects – or, rather, the agents – of Skupinska’s abstract compositions.

In an exhibition devoid of images in the conventional sense, each work is imbued with fugitive sense impressions. Like Bachelard’s attempt to grasp onto the mobile images of air and light, the sculpture and painting on display make the fast-moving matter of perception feel sticky and palpable. Can the study of fleeting images be a subject? The works shown here suggest that it must be.

Text by Sybilla Griffin