Page 9 - TOP 10 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS - Volume VI

art of making portraits by using clay. He discovered this with the only imaginary, an illusion. They are the deception of the senses,
help of his daughter, who fell in love with a young man. Because not far from a magic trick: “Such human experience is the basis for
he was sent abroad, she drew the outline of his face upon a wall. the painting of shaded images, which is in no sense lagging behind
Her father impressed this outline into clay and created an image magic, conjuration and many other similar tricks.” This belief had a
…”. The beginnings of the art of painting and sculpture are thus fatal influence on the development of the European art.
not connected with the fine arts’ reproduction of the corporality
of some figure or object, but with the flat outline of a projected When Rimele sets a trap for the observer’s curiosity and
profile, such as can be seen in Egyptian art and Ancient Greek uncertainty, the creative impulses conditioning his installations do
painted vases. Only then followed the mimetic imitation of the third not differ much from anecdotes of the mythical master Zeuxis, who
dimension, which was canonized already in antiquity and then again painted grapes so authentically that birds started to fly towards
from the Renaissance on, until its abandonment by modernism. them in order to eat them. But his rival Parrhasios defeated him:
After finishing his studies, Rimele did a lot of theoretical thinking he painted a curtain so convincingly that Zeuxis ordered it to
about non-mimetic, flat, monochromatic images and has also been be drawn open. When he realized his mistake, he was honest
creating them in practice. enough to admit that, while he was able to fool only an animal,
Parrhasios succeeded in fooling a man, even an artist. Rimele’s
The second, even more important myth, according to which installations also cause the observers’ movement, similar to a
shadows are crucial for the perception of what really exists, is situation described by Filarete between the years 1461 and 1464
Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which people have been chained in his Treatise on Architecture: The young Giotto was working as
since childhood so that they cannot move and can only look an apprentice in Cimabue’s studio, where he carefully painted a
forwards at a wall. Shadows are cast upon the wall as if upon a fly on the nose of one of the master’s unfinished figures. The next
screen because of the light of the fire behind them. These shadows day the master, before continuing his work, tried to chase the fly
come from various stone and wooden figures of people, animals away with a cloth. Only then did the master realize his mistake.
and different objects, which are carried by puppeteers who are The motionless image forced Giotto’s master to come closer and
hidden behind another wall behind the chained prisoners. When wave his hand towards the cause of the illusion which upset him,
these spectators talk about the shadows, which are all they can for he did not recognize it as an image. Rimele’s observers move in
see and recognize, they are convinced that they are talking about a similar way when they search unsuccessfully for an active source
real things. If someone were to show them the figures which were of light, for this light is only a passive reflection.
casting these shadows, they would believe the shadows to be
truer than the figures. However, the prisoners would not be able to The shadow did not find its place in the history of the art of painting
look into the light of the fire casting the shadows, but would divert for a long time, despite Alberti’s accurate instructions from the
their eyes from it, in the same way we cannot look directly into the first half of the 15th century: “The painters need first to carefully
sun in this world. If a chained person were to be brought outside study the light and the shadows and observe the colour becoming
into the sunlight, that person’s eyes would be full of brilliance and more intensive and brilliant on the surfaces on which light is falling,
unable to recognize any of the objects which are real to us, until and the same colour becoming duller where the power of the light
they became used to the light. When the prisoner returned to the diminishes.” It was still uncommon when Leonardo’s experiments
cave and tried to explain to the fellow prisoners that what they showed the creation of shadows when light falls upon a ball from
see is only a dim reflection of reality, they would not believe what different angles, or when Dürer’s experiments revealed the effect of
they heard. The enlightened individual would have trouble showing placing a cube in front of a ray of light. Alberti, Leonardo and Dürer
them the way towards light only confirmed theoretically what many had already experienced in
practice: that the casting of the shadows is important for the
Let us leave aside the numerous philosophical and artistic creation of an illusion of the third dimension on the carrier,
implications Plato’s cave has had – from a simple children’s for a painted object on which light falls in a perspectival way
game of creating silhouettes of animals and other figures on the proves its “reality” through the shadow it casts. However,
wall, to the theatre of shadows, public performances featuring all three also determined that if the artist depicted every
phantasmagoric monsters in dark projection halls by the help of shadow which was actually reflected behind an illuminated
the first reflectors, and German expressionist film – and focus on object, paintings would no longer be appealing. That is
contemporary media. Today, Plato’s cave is not only an excellent why their works remained intentionally a world without
allegory for film projection, the persuasiveness of which consists shadows, despite their rich palette and mastered toning,
of the constant evasiveness of the truth, as well as the creation for shadows would disturb the integrity and harmony of
of fiction and lies, but has also encouraged a number of spatial the compositions. As a consequence, a rule was imposed
installations where illuminated objects cast shadows which the at the academies of art until the 18th century, set by the
spectators are convinced belong to other objects. French painter, fine arts critic and theoretician Roger de
Piles, according to which a painter needed to display and
Rimele also likes to stress that his installations require, in the illuminate the objects which he depicted in such a way
existential and psychological sense, “the spectators’ effort to that they received as much light and darkness as would //TOP 10 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
familiarize themselves with something which offers relatively little. suit him for his painting. Leonardo therefore advised that
Additionally, that what it offers is in the form of information which the painters’ studios should have windows on the northern
is mobile and changing. The creation or the changing of images side, so that the light would be dispersed and the shadows
evokes in the observer a feeling of uneasiness which is connected would be less sharply projected. The only ones opposed
to intangibility. Everything is in front of us, in the form of matter and to this were artists such as El Greco, who needed a lot of
within reach, and yet the eyes search for support in order to be able dramatic light, and later on modernists who were influenced
to see.” It is to be expected that the visitors of Rimele’s expositions by Japanese art.
first hurry towards the objects in order to discover a bulb or other
source of illumination. At this point, the Freudian uncanny of the Of course, artists could not always avoid the shadow,
observer becomes the artist’s enjoyment. Plato believed that the particularly not in the cases when it was mentioned in the
art of painting was the imitation of the appearance of the objects Bible. Among the most monumental paintings is Masaccio’s
which are accessible to the senses – imitation only of superficial representation of Saint Peter from the 1420s. Saint Peter’s
impressions and not of reality, which is why the created things are shadow had miraculous powers and he used these powers