Magic hour

Light and dark are bound. Light, in the spectrum of natural or artificial happenings, is the most fascinating and appealing to me. A star light, sun or moon light, a sparkle, a lighting, a bulb, a flare. The lens flare (in photography or cinematography) is one of my favorites, moreover because flares were considered a technical fault and now they became part of the aesthetic of cinema in particular. I have been gathering some of my own flares into my an archive and this video is one of them. Flare out (2018, 1’03’’loop, no sound), was part of an installation in the exhibition Uncertain Image – that took place at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, and aimed at questioning the truthness of the image. When an image is addressed, the phenomenon created by a light projected over a surface comes inevitably into play. In the case of a Flare, t“surface” is the camera device, its lens.  The magical quality embodied by the projection is given by its colours and the loop cycle,  creating a hypnotic effect of a dream slumber in the viewer. In the exhibition, the very fact that the projection starts to play when day time turned into night enhanced its quality as a magical and ethereal phenomenon, leading our perception into a strange state, an exciting sense of eeriness of the strangely familiar, or the familiar that is nonetheless strange. To feel is to see.