(En) Meyer Riegger is pleased to present Cluster Illusion, the second solo exhibition of the Dutch artist Melvin Moti in its Karlsruhe gallery space. Melvin Moti examines forms of visual culture in relation to science and history in his artwork. Light and perception as well as techniques of recording them are recurrent subjects in his pictures, objects, films and installations – addressing the space between regulative structure and coincidence is also continuous theme. His current exhibition, …
(En) Meyer Riegger is pleased to present Cluster Illusion, the second solo exhibition of the Dutch artist Melvin Moti in its Karlsruhe gallery space. Melvin Moti examines forms of visual culture in relation to science and history in his artwork. Light and perception as well as techniques of recording them are recurrent subjects in his pictures, objects, films and installations – addressing the space between regulative structure and coincidence is also continuous theme. His current exhibition, Cluster Illusion, originated in a stay in Japan, where Moti developed the eponymous series of works in Tokyo, and recently exhibited them for the first time at the Mori Art Museum.
Eight free-hanging pieces of printed silk feature structures of individual, sometimes very dense dots, which can occasionally crystallise into figuration in the viewer´s eye. The pieces were developed in co-operation with a Japanese textile printing master using the Edo komon dyeing technique, which is traditionally used for printing on cloth, for instance kimonos, and which embodies variants of visual symbolism in its mode of execution. Three pieces from Moti´s series show panoramic landscapes, traversed by sunbeams and clouds. They are based on photographs taken by the artist, but their approach also references traditional Dutch landscape painting.
Five further pieces show different constellations, among them Turdus Solitarius as well as Noctua. These both denote the same group of stars, one that had different designations and constellation figures assigned to it according to different scientific construals. Their figurative interpretation is based on an instance of the situative allocation of significance. And thus on coincidence? The title of the work series, Cluster Illusion seizes on this symbolism, for what the clustering illusion describes is the natural human tendency to recognise patterns – even where they do not exist. Melvin Moti´s print series is oriented toward this phenomenon. His granular, almost photographical pictures address figuration as well as abstraction, while they evade a concrete definition of either. The calculable, in turn, is the subject of his piece on emerald silk, here Moti creates a conceptual analogy to early computer monitors, and thus to programs based on randomisation and order.
Finally Melvin Moti quite literally brings the synthesis of technology and free rein to a culminating point in a drawing series based on the Zen meditation method of drawing dots on a sheet paper according to coincidence, following no conscious structural order. For this piece Moti invited an Australian Zen teacher to practice this method – thereby juxtaposing the Cluster Illusion series, which was crafted with the greatest of precision, with a very poetic piece, which allows the viewer´s gaze to shift between the figurative and the abstract, the tangible and the magical, on a reduced, but no less illusory level.
Text: Christina Irrgang
Translation: Zoe Claire Miller