It is what it is

Marcel Schwittlick

Artwork description:

The series is a playful yet systematic exploration of the potentials of generative art and concrete photography. The main characteristic of concrete art is that it is non-figurative, anti-anecdotal and it is premised on aesthetic autonomy, signifying nothing other than itself. It is an art form that wants to free perception from any a prioris, aiming at opening up new possibilities for rational categories of aesthetic apprehension – an approach that invites us to practice our abilities to decode, differentiate and recognize form and classes of meaning. It brings new perspectives on forms, form relationships and visual orders into consciousness.

Black, white and shades of grey resonate in the mind of the beholder: there is no message. Just like colour, concrete photography is irreducible. The colour black leads only to itself – and also to the whole universe. A signifier that leads to another signifier, this is Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics, the delta of the modern, of the search for the sign-based self-awareness of art. Schwittlick’s luminograms, like any successful achievement in form and colour, are there to facilitate our demolishing of the common misconception that “beauty” and “art” are subject to be defined or taken for granted as complete systems or defined categories. Putting us to work, these images gently invite us to become more conscious of our inherited and learnable abilities.