Translucent Sculptures

ICSO

Inflated Cellular Structure Objects ( ICSO ) - Mixed white
2012
Diameter: 80 cm
Blown glass, stainless steel, Led Lights

Cellular Structure Objects ( ICSO ) - Opal Black
2012
Diameter: 100 cm
Blown glass, stainless steel

Eye of Light

Eye of Light
2000
310 x 330 x 590 cm
Sculpted glass, steel, choreographed strobe light system

Eye of Light

It is an exceptional thing.
There is a degree of subversion, one must admit, if not perversion, in this unprecedented metamorphosis of glass from small-scale, liquid-bearing vessels to an immense architectural installation of extravagant proportions so enormous we may, no, we have to, actually enter it.
Perversion is according to Edgar Allan Poe - a writer whose imagination moves amongst exceptional things: "an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something". It is, in fact, explains Poe in the tale "The Imp of the Perverse": "a mobile without motive".
The "Eye of light" assumed shape from the spirit of the Perverse. It simply "had to be done", the artist tells me. Because reason deterred the artist from creating this fantasy, therefore did he the most impetuously create it. That is, approach it.
And now we follow... Through perversions promptings we act without comprehensible object. We act for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions it becomes absolutely irresistible. We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain.

If sculpture is the art of carving movement in a motionless mass, it would be wrong to call "Eye of light" sculpture. It does not aim to suggest movement by imprisoning it in noble but inert substances like bronze or gold, where it would be doomed forever to immobility: the "eye" lures it into being, by the use of unstable and base materials, building a strange construction of transparent glass and the blackest of metal.
Hans Christian Berg has observed, and remains true to the fact, that glass is one of the few materials that transmit light and radiate colour. Our appreciation of the Eye is tempered by the light and colour, but also by the dangerous nature of glass. While sensually beautiful, any glass can break or shatter. Therefore, the unexpected tension that the Eye creates between attraction and danger may heighten our sensory experience of the work. This combined with the Eye's large size - it is large-sized to the human and beyond – allows us to relate to it on a corporeal as well as aesthetic level. The monumental bio morph is sized to overpower and command the space in which it is installed. We find ourselves in a position where reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore, it is, as Poe says, that we cannot. "If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed".

Eye of Light hangs on the end of a thread like a spider and it borrows its life from the sun. It feeds on daylight and, during nighttime, the all but vague life of technology, yes, it feeds on daylight and electricity, it breathes during the day, it merely sways inanely, it is something between matter and life, then... when night falls, it suddenly seems endowed with intention. It becomes violently agitated. A brain, artificial, carries the mechanism of the Eye to that point of delirium where it becomes a monstrous beast whose tentacles set fire to the hero's, that is ours, inexhaustible bodies. The bristling body electrifies, the nerves revulse: desire, horror? I don't know but lets begin with horror.

Horror

The knot of Eye of Light reminds me of another knot. The spasms remind me of other spasms. A body - but this time the body is human. The living sculpture reminds me of the story of another body. A body, which was just as the body of Eye of Light: dead. It is a humorous story. It is another tale by Edgar Allan Poe. Since Eye of Light has all the characteristics of a young art: exuberance, buoyancy, vigour and humour. And since Eye of Light suggests more aspects than I can imagine. I am not afraid of opening the gates to this scene where Poe places the knot under the left ear of the main character in the tale "Loss of Breath". The main character, while shouting insults at his wife, suddenly –to his despair- looses his breath. He is determined at all events to conceal the matter from his wife, until further experience should discover to him the extent of this, his "unheard-of calamity". He goes to a neighbouring apothecary who has an idea that he is actually dead. Many things happen after this, the man who has lost his breath goes through several curious experiments, he is taken to a garret and left alone to silence and to meditation, he escapes but is taken for an mail-robber. In the end he ends up at his inevitable fate: the gallows. The hangman adjusts the noose about his neck. The drop falls. The now hanged main character utters the following words to the reader:
"I must mention, however, that die I did not. My body was, but I had no breath to be, suspended..."
This is what Eye of Light is: a body having no other existence than its movement. Its movement as both appearance and reality, this transcendence embeds itself in the Eye as its irreducible foundation, the atemporality overwhelms anxiety. The Eye of Light lives and then it becomes a corpse. And we watch. Desire is said to be the driving force behind the gaze and the pleasure of looking. Like the crowd watch the hanged man in Poe's story, who does his best to give the crowd the worth of their trouble, his "convulsions were said to be extraordinary". His "spasms it would be hard to beat." Just as the populace in "Loss of Breath", we encore.

Desire

Though made with human hand Eye of Light never has the precision and efficiency of an automaton. The economy of this machine is quite peculiar. It is a "situation object". A visible form that captures a moment and gives a new impetus to the imperceptible interrelations of subjects: meeting surfaces, places of exchange where the refusals, the looks, the consents, the evasions cross one another. The light relays material density decreases in proportion to the complexity of the meaning they convey. Their value is that of the combination of relations they establish, which are established through them. Their fragile and transparent pattern is only the nervure of situations. The Eye of Light is a knot. This is the Ariadne aspect of the Eye. The thread held at its, in this case, hundred ends by consciousnesses that look for each other, escape each other, capture each other, and rescue each other, and now they are again separated from each other by that thread which, indissociably, links them together. All these Ariadne objects play with the stratagems of truth at the threshold of light and illusion.
In the end escape is inconceivable; the only way out is in the direction of that dark point which indicates the centre, the infernal fire, the law of the figure. No longer threads that one ties and unties but corridors in which one is swallowed up.

Tomas Ivan Träskman, critic, curator.