Thousand Six Hundred Light Years

 

2006 >
Manuel Abendroth, Jerome Decock, Els Vermang
 

Size: Variable
 

Technique: radioluminescent paint, geiger counter, microphone, speaker

 

 

‘Thousand Six Hundred Light Years’ questions the historic legacy and the nowadays relevancy of the monochrome as most iconic and emblematic form of painting; its reduction to one single colour and its possibility to inscribe in a pictorial tradition and avant-garde thinking. If the black square on a black background by Malevich proposes a new space-time construct and Yves Klein's blue embraces the notion of infinity, than ‘Thousand Six Hundred Light Years’ radio-luminescent monochrome  is in contrary an expression of something finite. It is constant emission of energy into space, a painting which slowly fades in time. Here the colour is a state within a process, a transforming matter, rendered tangible by the clicking Geiger counter. The pigment’s half-time of 1600 years is beyond any human perception. What remains for the spectator is the construct of the work; a  single colour. ‘Thousand Six Hundred Light Years’ s monochrome thus is an expression of thought, a reflection about its meaning only: a statement about art as idea - the monochrome as idea.