22 April 2010

Karl Martin Holzhäuser

Painting with Light :: Karl Martin Holzhäuser

Operating in total darkness, he moves a "light-brush" (a lamp inside a narrow oblong box with variable openings in the bottom) along horizontal and vertical rails over sensitized paper, thus exposing it directly, without an interfering lens. Small parallel slides in the bottom of this "brush" enable the artist to control the quantity of light emerging from his device.

Holzhäuser says:
"For the time being I am still very busy exploring the possibilities of the fundamental photographic process, especially as I feel increasingly free in handling it, in reducing its material and technical aspects to a minimum in order to create a picture purely from light. Probably this urge "back to the roots" also explains my present predilection for black and white, the inspiring association with the original and fundamental photographic process; I am working right at the basis. The process itself is the origin of the picture. Nothing but light touching paper: That is painting with light in its purest form. Maybe some day I'll really become a painter in the traditional sense of the word. It is possibly significant that the darker parts of my present black-and-white "paintings" often assume a peculiar velvety materialness and a strikingly graphic note. Perhaps the borderline turns out to be fluid, somewhere very far underneath."

From an article on Holzhäuser's process:
The individual colors are obtained by the use of filters whose tints must be complementary to the intended colors because the sensitized paper is being exposed directly, without any intermediary steps. The mechanical part of the technique consists of cutting pieces of filter foil to the width of the intended color stripes, applying translucent coats of the respective colors to the foils, and gluing them onto the predesignated sections of the light brush.

The color ultimately shown on the paper is determined, on the one hand, by the tint and density of the coating, and, on the other, by the speed of moving the light brush during the exposure. Although Holzhaeuser conducts meticulous test series in order to define the filter colors, chance influences remain, particularly during the exposure and the subsequent chemical process.

Since his first experiments in this area, the artist has pursued mainly three directions of coloration, namely (1) combinations of the three primary optical colors blue, green and red, (2) monochromatic light/dark graduations created by successive exposures (as against the simultaneous use of several filters for the multicolored paintings), and (3) color chords either comprising the entire spectrum or composed of colors complementary to one another.

and a note from me: !!!

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