artur lescher

While weight enjoys the privileges of realism and has the hardness of life on its side, lightness seems to be of a lesser and paradoxical quality. Isn’t a visionary he who seeks to break loose from the force of gravity? How does one dare to hang in suspension when everything seeks support, and how can one proclaim the truths of levitation when everyone points to falling as our final destiny?

In the unending debate between weight and lightness and between the idleness of support and the tenseness of suspension, Asterismos [Asterisms], by Artur Lescher, responds with the victory of lightness and the ascensional. Most of the objects included in the installation, despite possessing great mass, float like mathematical yogis and levitating entities. The pieces composed of tensioned wires are shot through by light and by the atmosphere of the surrounding space; some have an identifiable base on the wall or floor, as is the case of the Borromean knot-shaped piece with myriad wires rising up from its basis of interlinked circles, forming aethereal volumes like luminous beams stretching to the aery heights.

Running against the grain of the brutalism of the phatic and the packages of experience grounded in the real, the artist’s work strives for Apollyon transfiguration: pain and the monstrous exists, but they migrate toward tensions and cuts, where the startlement takes one’s breath away. (Concerning the adjective used to describe this transfiguration, it should be noted that the god of the sun himself, Apollo, son of Zeus, the inventor of harmony and balance, fought against Python and never aimed to quash the human drives, but rather sought to guide them in the direction of an ideal of culture.)

Even when the pieces are unstuck from the floor, they remain close to it, while never escaping from their connection with the lofty realms. Geometric star shapes are drawn on the floor by the shadows of what hovers above it. Whatever is reflected on polished or industrially painted surfaces, in the case of the solid pieces in wood or metal, or crossed through, in the pieces composed of wires, is in strict dialogue with the atmosphere and lighting of the space in which they are inserted.

The visual allure, in turn, dazzling the observer with slender sparkling mirrors ending sharply at fragile points, is not welcoming, nor available to the touch or to interaction. There is no immersive intimacy here, thus revealing the ambiguity of this sublime but aloof beauty. It is to be contemplated.

If the loss of transcendence (the death of God) led to a disinterest in heaven and confined man to the terrestrial and immanent realm, the artist recovers a poetics of height insofar as the asterism connects what is here below to what is there above. As a thinker of architecture, Lescher criticizes functionalism and proposes a nonreligious re-founding of the celestial. We are linked in a game to the geometric star shapes and their patterns! Here once again one notes a displacement from the phatic and from the literalness that characterizes contemporary art.

Whoever ventures into Lescher’s spaces and grasps his message will foresee that one day we will leave our impatience and immediacy and will perhaps stop listening only to our own cry.