Tillman Kaiser’s objects and sculptures expand the field of what can still be viewed as a photographic image. Mirrored forms emit fragmented signals from the distant past of photography, from Wedgwood and Niépce all the way to Schad and Ray.
Above all, however, Kaiser is a painter characterised by his toying with the legacy of modernity and with elements of pop-culture. He intermingles them into a universal abstract language containing disruptive elements – fragments of black and white photographs. Nonetheless they are always found photographs, not ones he has taken himself. Apparently the only exception is his work Hallucination Engine, consisting of large-format photographic wallpaper employing the motif of Brâncuşi’s Coloana infinitului. He allegedly discovered the original advertising photograph in one of the offices of the Viennese branch of the Rumanian airline Tarom. After making repeated and unsuccessful requests for a copy of the image, and having made sure the airline did not own the copyright for the photo of Brâncuşi’s sculpture, he decided to take a photograph of the ad from the street through an open window. The blurred colour snapshot has become something of a transitional moment in his artistic practice. Kaiser has progressively moved from reproducing photographic fragments and photographing reproductions to making contemporary photograms, giving a contemporary twist to the old technique of photography without a camera. The black surfaces of the pictures are created using a flash. The white areas remain as traces of whatever cast its shadow on the photosensitive surface. The common trait of the works is an emphasis on the negative image. In its essence, every photogram is a kind of blind negative, a negative that cannot be further reproduced. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was not yet possible to chemically fix photograms, and they could only be viewed in the dark under candlelight. If the photogram was exposed to daylight by accident, the image went black and was irretrievably lost. Even though light is invisible, it has the capacity to create images.
It would be somewhat misleading to only talk about the technical process which long ago laid the foundations for the discovery of the photographic image, however. Proposal for an Altar is also an attempt at a distinctive gesamtkunstwerk, an attempt to rediscover the possibility of depicting the sacred by at least drawing attention to it in its absence. Most religions in their current forms have probably lost their ability to mediate images of the sacred. Kaiser does not make repeated efforts to resurrect the sacred, instead searching for possibilities to capture its absence as faithfully as possible. Photographs capture shadows of reality, his photograms attempt to capture the shadows of paradise.
Jiří Havlíček
