SURFACE Tension
“The world is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural.” (Louis MacNeice)
From the earliest times, philosophers and artists have negotiated anxieties about what is real and what is not. From the insubstantial pageant played out on the wall of Plato’s Cave to St Paul’s conclusion that, in this life, we can see only through a glass darkly, human beings have been warned that appearances deceive, and that Truth lies elsewhere. With the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, it seemed that painting might become redundant now that “reality” or the truth of things could be captured with a machine. But art wasn’t giving up without a fight: the impressionists learned how to dissolve forms and, soon, the cubists, who followed after, in the words of Steven Kern, “cracked the mirror of art.”
Inspired by this cultural tradition, in this series of photos I have tried to capture something of the spatial ambiguity and surface tensions I see everyday in city streets from Brussels to Beijing. I am constantly struck by the way that a trick of the light can create accidental beauty, bestow unexpected geometry on the most banal of objects, and translate the hard, the solid, and the seemingly permanent into passing illusions.