BORDER CROSSING 

BORDER CROSSING, 2017
2000 X 1100 mm
oil, Swarovski crystals and 3D modelling on  C-type print, facemount on glossy plexi / alu-dibond 2+3mm, box framed with black lacquer frame, Museum glass and LED light.

“Border-crossing” explores the boundaries between the world of appearances and what it barely conceals. The work lends itself to multiple interpretations: it critiques the superficiality with which we relate to the sacred, but also make us look again at our certainties with regard to the structure of values and ideals supporting contemporary western society.

Symbolic borders are fringes on the plane of the mental or metaphorical landscape. They can also be described as differences, understood as being regulated by spatial metaphors of crossing (inside/outside). “Borders-crossing” is emanating the dialectic relation connecting past and present, shadow and light, abstraction and figuration, tangible and intangible, faith and scepticism, and transparency and obscurity.

“Border crossing” is acting as a historical archive, about the world itself and how we relate to it. The work has a rebellious baroque sensibility wherein the central figure of a dissolving Christ-figure (like an effervescent tablet of sorts) is placed within an apocalyptic wasteland. This landscape contains traces of scars of rituals and faithful violence. Contemporary scenes of Aleppo bombings and other forms of war and devastation seamlessly co-exist with numerous art historical traces. In that liminal zone, sacred and profane are mixed like blood and wine.

In the work of AD-reflex the viewer cannot always rely what constitutes fact or fiction, which is an outcome of toiling work in the studio and which was transformed and disrupted.  The original ‘photographic traces’ bubbling underneath the surface of the Diasec / face mountingare constantly altered with several digital art techniques, Swarovski crystals and oil painting.  The painterly elements on Diasec / face mounting are an unexpected example of how the artists creatively archive within and without what we perceive to be a certainty.