Imagine a very large object shrinking to a tenth or less of its volume. It is condensing towards its center. Its color becomes more and more intense. Slowly imploding, it draws in the surrounding space. What remains in the end is a condensation and concentration of an originally extended thing, a bundle of energy, you would not dare to touch.

My “Real Objects” are visual sensations in space. Like domes or vaults they are part of the wall and features of the space. In reverse the wall and the surrounding space become part of the objects.

The basic of my constructions are simple geometric shapes and symmetries, like you find them in crystals, microorganisms and plants. The character of the objects represents archetypes like boat, spear, cave, eye, horizon, etc.

Beyond their cool technical precision the objects appear sensual and organic. The resemblance to living organisms and deeply rooted images create a direct and affective relation with the viewer – an archetypical resonance.

Layers of paint or tissue are applied to wood or plastic. The color is either bright and luminous or of light absorbing darkness. Sometimes they are surrounded by a fluorescent halo, reflected from intensive colors on the backside.

For me the emotional effect of color and its deforming impact on space is crucial. The objects structure offers few clues for a three dimensional perception: no intersections, no slanting lines to see in perspective. Only the coloring determines the three dimensional appearance. Some depths seem deeper, others flattened by the color; a plane seems concavely or convexly deformed.

If you project the image of a sphere onto the hollow of a bowl, convex and concave compensate, the appearance is curiously flat and hovering.

Thus the paint looses materiality, color seems to shimmer in front of the surface, detached from it. You get the impression of a phantom rather than of a definite tangible body. The object seems to float, to shrink and to grow.

This irritating impression contrasts the real space in where the object is are installed. The space around us is familiar and solid. Everything is where it belongs to. Only at the very part of the wall, where the object is hovering, the normal appearance of space is suspended; it looks like a leak in the three dimensional reality. Here flows the energy of the real space over into the virtual space of the object.

The objects are blueprints of another dimension; blueprints like the ones you discover in archetypes of basic forms; blueprints emerged from ardent desire.

Gerhard Mantz , Berlin 1988