Cognitive Elapse essentially means a loss of memory, but also implies disregarding consciousness or entering a dreamlike state of mind.
Dreamrealm has always been fashinating the greatest artist of all times, involving every form of visual art and literacture: from Goya to Redon, from Shakespeare to William Blake, from H.R. Giger to Dave Mc Kean, from Freud's theories to Borges' dreams.
This 'Twilight Art" describes the focal passage in which light decreases, giving way to darkness and to the wildest imagination, inhabited by obscure creatures whose shapes blend with the surrounding deep black, revealing just details, often laden with strong symbolism.
Dream as darkness, since the fairy mythology of childhood, as The Sandman's tales sprinkling sandgrains into the eyes of children who don't want to go to sleep.Darkness reveales what daylight hides, leaving space to our deepest fear but also to our most sensitive imagination.
Night time slows down with the breath, the space expands and takes our mind to wander away, through imaginary realms where boundaries blur to horizon and a fine mist envelops our eyes.
It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams. (2)Those places reached by our imagination are often too interior and subjective to be described only with words, that's when images come into play, giving birth to overlapping space-time, nuances, drowsiness, and deep black backgrounds that evoke nightmares and creatures living in this
parallel and obscure world, an underworld realm that reminds us Oberon's sagas, Odin's power, the mists of Avalon
Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot. ...(3)Erik Kirton makes us travelling through a dark dream, presenting his solo show in this two series of works: Vintage Photography and Mixed Media.
The first set collects analogic photographs, sepia-toned and black -and-white prints manipulated in the darkroom, often acting directly on the negative-film with scratches or burns, ad memoriam of the passing of time and the vulnerability of materials: spectral buildings, winding statues with expressions full of pathos, a tombstone where white roses lie, to whose images i might istinctly associate as a soundtrack Love Will Tear Us Apart and all the deep concerns of Jan Curtis.
Kirton's photographic background comes from several years spent in the darkroom, experimenting and daring new techniques, and even now that the digital processing has substituted the primitive printing technology, radically changing the way we see and conceive photography, Eric Kirton brings us back to the past with an nostalgic eye on daguerreotypes and cyanotypes, arguing the importance of outdated methods of the past coexisting with modern technologies, in order to fill the artwork with deep human sense, thus allowing us to break free from the boundaries of today’s omnipresent modernization.
Restricting oneself to a single, redundant technique is the gravest mistake any artist could make. Too often, we are assaulted with imagery that is so generic, it is practically impossible to recognize the human aspect, within. Algorithmic calculations have replaced creativity, and the sub-culture has been commercialized to the point that it has become a mere caricature of its former self. What was once cutting-edge has been mass produced and sold on every television station around the globe. (4)In series 'Mixed Media' serie, Kirton presents instead digitally manipulated works, collages of photographs, paintings and 3d sculptures, art made of sinuous biomechanical creatures with long antennas and tentacles that mate and fuse with human faces and skulls while a postmodern Icarus near a black sun raises his arms to heaven, in an attempt to redemption.
what power would hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven? (5)Time in this Nightmare-realm is endlessly marked by an old clock fixed on the 8, the symbol of the portal to the Infinite, like a Moebius strip, the Ethernal succession between dream and waking, until the merge of these into an eternal season of mists, typical of dreams.
(Paola Verde)
Notes:
1 "Ex Oblivione" by H. P. Lovecraft, 1920
2 "Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders" by Neil Gaiman, William Morrow, 2006
3 SANDMAN #19: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Neil Gaiman, 1990
4 Erik Kirton, interview 2010
5 SANDMAN "A Hope In Hell" by Neil Gaiman, 1988During the opening night short movie projections:" The Fallacy of Truth" 06'48" music: The Fallacy of Truth from the album "Deus ex Machina"" Random Structures" 14'20" music: Erik Kirton video: Melle von der Nebel " Eidola'" 06'35" video: Giuseppe Boccassini music: Fabio Orsi
BIOGRAPHYErik Kirton was born in Florida, then in the 80's he moved to Europe and he is currently living in Würzburg, Germany.
Since 1989, he has been exhibiting in the United States and throughout Europe.
His last exhibition took place in Poznam (Poland) in september 2010.
Upcoming shows, in 2011, will include video and music collaborations with Maya (a video artist, based in Aix-en_Provence,
France), and will be performed live in Nice, Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig.
www.myspace.com/cyaninediewww.facebook.com/erik.kirtonwww.abnormals.org (only for Abnormals members)
