Christian Larsen

Artists:

Exhibitions:

Daniel Lergon:

Daniel Lergon, Acrylic on fabric, 2008

Cold Fire

Daniel Lergon (born - 78) lives and works in Berlin. His style of painting may appear simple, but builds upon perceptive mechanisms and the use of experimental and emblematic materials. Lergon challenges the limits of visibility by using, among other things, fluorescent colours – a form of exploratory experimentation reminiscent of James Turell’s and Olafur Eliasson’s work with light.

”Cold fire”, the title of the exhibition, is a notion which describes different types of luminescence generated without heat. Some of Lergon’s new paintings make use of specific colour combinations that transform infrared and ultraviolet light, which normally belong to the invisible colour spectrum, into visible light.

Lergon has adjusted his large-scale paintings to fit the gallery, but he has also forced the gallery to adapt to his paintings. The architecture of the exhibit consists of two parts: one treating contrasts, the other reflecting yellow light. In juxtaposition to these clinically scientific aspects are the deeply symbolic and metaphoric meanings of a form of painting, which renders the invisible visible. The Norwegian art historian Erland Hammer has summarized this simile in the following manner: "Light as a metaphor is the oldest trick in the book. In the first three verses of Genesis we find the roots to nearly all of Western philosophy. Embedded in the notion of "creation" understood as a "something" that arises from a "nothing", we find the Platonic world view that would later reach its peak in the form of Cartesian dualism; the schism between body and mind, thought and matter and all that stuff"