Ernestine Faux’s - landscape colour interventions
There is a long tradition of creating and placing stone and metal sculptures within the landscape. To embellish an external area with three-dimensional colour plastics is a novelty in artistic expression, rare as well as innovative. The artist from Graz introduces us to her CHROMATIC COSMOGRAMS, which offer visual sensation and encourage discourse regarding colours and landscape.
Measuring up to three meters in diameter, the discs are made of coats of resin and are, in the majority of cases, painted in a monochromatic palette. From afar, the discs are perceived as colourful dots in the landscape, rapidly becoming an alluring visual point of reference, drawing us near to investigate further, until one feels as one with the colour in front of them.
Experiencing an “immersion into colour“, outdoors in natural lighting, allows the viewer to see the tints in all their purity which may well be the essence of the artist’s intention.
It takes time, which is very precious nowadays, to see the colours in the sculptural object. To witness the entire spectrum of a colour as seen in natural light is a sight that we cannot perceive in museums or galleries with their use of artificial lighting.
“To see colour, is to see life!“ – a term by Raimer Jochims, a fellow artist, that can certainly be understood more deeply during contemplation of Ernestine Faux’s Chromatic Cosmograms.
The positioning of sculptures within a landscape can be traced back to the monolithic age and the practice of “stone setting“. The stones would have been set in order to establish a far reaching relationship between the sky, the ground, the elements and the visible, as well as intangible forces within a landscape. This will strengthen, purify and invigorate the site, its surroundings and its dwellers.
By making her objects “colour – image” settings, Ernestine Faux is not only perpetuating this monolithic tradition, but also broadening it and bringing it in as a new form into the contemporary. Given that an image is literally positioned within a landscape, we are reminded of Paul Cezanne’s words which describe art as: “a harmony parallel with nature“.
“DISK - cadmium orange”
“DISK - spectro chrom”
