I participated in the preselections for the Canvascollectie 2012 in SMAK, Ghent. I was lucky enough (or should I say, good enough) to have two of my three proposed works selected.

All 3 works were chosen from the Series “Imaginary Science“.

With “Imaginary Science” I continue on the theme that art is an experiment. As each experiment it follows a certain process, it investigates and those acts lead to a result. In this series I combine the process – the artistic/experimental setup – with the result.

The B/W photos are macro photos of a microscope under which a thin layer of paint is smeared on a slide. This is the setup. The photos gain texture by adding the 3 colours that I used to create the paint smear.

When photographing the light that shines through this paint smear in an out-of-focus fashion you get discs of coloured light. Depending on the focus distance these discs are larger or smaller.

Now, the experiment that is being undertaken here is that of visual compression of reality. It’s astonishing that the disc of light contains all the information of the focused image, but it compresses all that information into an abstract representation. I’m explicitly not talking about visual reduction, as the informative value is not reduced, but about compression, as only its context is reduced. From the viewer’s standpoint however, this creates a paradox is his context might be extended instead of reduced because of the abstraction of the image.

I combine process and result in the same artistic series to prevent a hyper-analysis of my work. By integrating the process in the artwork itself, there is nothing more to add. This is it, this is the whole thing, and nothing more; only leaving some margin for a harmless meta-analysis.

A scientific approach to this work is detailed in Arylide Yellow and Copper Phthalocyanine to Reprocess Grey Scale Images; Belgian Imag Sc Res Ann 2010:01:1-2