sfumato

_grau is a personal reflection on memories coming up during a car accident, where past events emerge, fuse, erode and finally vanish ethereally … various real sources where distorted, filtered and fitted into a sculptural structure to create not a plain abstract, but a very private snapshot of a whole life within its last seconds.

A former East German boxing champion reduced to working as a bouncer and debt collector is forced to reflect on his life when he is diagnosed with a fatal disease.

The term hysteresis soberly describes a processual behaviour where the previous history affects the result as much as new changes. Robert Seidel enters analogue drawings, performance footage of the queer dancer Tsuki and pluck sounds and drones by Oval into a feedback system that reorganises time and movement in a multicoloured and sensual organic tableau.

The nine virtual sculptures underlying vitreous resulted from experimental setups by Robert Seidel for generating three-dimensional clusters of fibrous refractions, as well as the gravitational lensing of different volumetric and chromatic densities. Singular elements gravitate towards each other, accumulating in a gigantic sculptural system, where each entity exists with its own visual axis and vanishing point. The impalpable luminous formations create prismatic interactions between the ridges and plateaux of the main colours floating in front of the infinite violet background.

E3 (∞, E = eternity, 3 = 3 month) is the first work trying to capture my drawing and painting style into a moving picture. It captures the beginning, with all its enthusiasm, energy and more or less sub-conscious hope that things develop differently in a new space. Followed by the phase were everything slows down to finally result in a complete breakdown into everyday life. This cycle happens over and over again, in all scales, in all relations … sometimes it can be a cozy, pleasant state … while other times it seems like Don Quixote, fighting against windmills …

An artefact from the time when I created my best-known experimental film “_grau”, while living in a district of my hometown Jena called “Winzerla”. The atmosphere in this building block area, built in the 1970s in East Germany, was sinister, but it gave me the solitude to refine my work in my private studio space. The dark undertones of that time have become engrained into my artistic practice, and coincidentally, a few years after I made the film, the right-wing terrorist group NSU met in the same district, thus opening one of the darkest chapters in recent German history." (Seidel)

This film is based on a live performance, in which a modular video synthesizer generates mental spaces between floating and overwriting realities.