Hartung | Trenz

For the edition Collumina 2023, an international Light Art Project run by Gallery Seippel, Cologne, Hartung and Trenz will show the ten year old work LIGHTSCAPE – ILLUSION in  a new full Hd, 2 channel video projection.

The neologism LIGHTSCAPE means the total light situation, the distribution pattern of light on an image. This artificial word that is often used as a product name for branded products (perfume, porcelain), in the lamp and lighting industry, photo art as well as computer animation, gradually becomes the keyword for light art and projection in public space. The term ILLUSION derives from the Latin word illudere, a composition of the verb ludere (play) and the local preposition in. Its meaning ranges from throwing into the game to play games with sb. up to intellectual game. The work LIGHTSCAPE – ILLUSION goes in for a visualized intellectual game about light as the source and basis of our visiual perception and reflects about the illusion of seeing. Formally starting point is the projected, set up serially in circled type term LIGHTSCAPE. The resulting disc and sphere typographies suggest perspective and three–dimensionality and provide lighting landscapes with different connotations. Light as a concept, as a phenomenon and medium is formally set in relation to associations such as kaleidoscope, rose window, globe, sun, iris, eye, atom, nucleus etc. and to the symbolic power of point, circle and sphere. The special technique of two congruent superimposed projections includes the viewer and his shadow into the apparent three–dimensionality of the projection and let it be part of the work.

In its complexity, LIGHTSCAPE – ILLUSION belongs to a series of works by Detlef Hartung and Georg Trenz, such as LICHTEN (2004), SPLENDORIS NOCTURNI (2007), or WHERE IS MY DESTINY (2020), which do not refer to a specific space, but deal with the relationship between light and seeing in an almost laboratory-like and analytical way.