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Photo: Foto Otto 1 image
Sjene/138
Goran Petercol
brass rods, wire, coloured light
67 × 16 × 20 cm
1994
Acquisition 1997
Inv. No. 0028
The most important mediums used by the Croatian artist are immaterial: light and shadow. By directing spots affixed to the wall at metal rods he can manipulate the shadows and in this way, produce “drawings” which are simultaneously poetic spatial pictures. Petercol is not interested in the phenomenon of light per se: “I’m not an illusionist”. He simply uses the laws of light transfer. “In a way my pictures construct themselves, I am dependent on the logic of the shadow...” The viewer is made insecure, because the relationship between cause and effect appears enigmatic. In Sjene/138 he made use of the phenomenon that two different light sources – one red and the other a special blue – cancel each other out, giving the wall the appearance of being white. Only the shadows form lines of red or blue because the rods and wires on the wall block, respectively, only one of the two sources of light.
Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)
Exhibitions
There is something you should know. Die EVN Sammlung im Belvedere, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 2000
Publications
Goran Petercol. Conventions [published in conjunction with the retrospective by Goran Petercol entitled “Don't worry about poetics, they will arrive on their own”, November 22, 2019 – January 5, 2020, Musem of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka], Zagreb 2019, p. 56
evn sammlung 95–05, Cologne 2005, p. 254 f
evn sammlung. Ankäufe 1995 – 1996, Maria Enzersdorf 1997, p. 28
Goran Petercol. 22nd Sao Paulo Biennale. 12 October – 11 December 1994, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Zagreb 1994, p. 38
Context
More light objects
More works
from 1994
More works
non-objective sculptures