Silverleaf on cotton
143 × 110 cm
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz / Purchased with funds from Stiftung Freunde des Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein
On the one hand, Dekyndt's artistic work deals with sociocultural and sociopolitical questions; on the other, in her works she traces and visualises physical and chemical processes and phenomena that take place in everyday life without us paying attention to them.
Slow Object 017 belongs to this latter group of the artist's works. We see a cotton cloth fastened to the wall at two points only and thus sagging slightly so as to cause a number of folds, some deep. This cloth is coated with silver leaf. As a result of the folds in the cloth, the silver surface reflects light in different ways. Even at first glance, this causes the surface of the piece to appear to be alive. At the same time, the coarse weave of the fabric is clearly visible. On the other hand, no figurative or abstract graphic or painterly representation can be made out. In fact, this is a monochrome image that appears to be a three-dimensional object by virtue of the folds.
Dekyndt has commenced a long-term project with this work. The silver leaf applied to the cotton will oxidise successively in the years to come, slowly darkening until it is completely black. Initially resplendent, shining a silvery white, over time this painting will re-paint itself and become black. How quickly or slowly this process occurs will depend on the degree of humidity and the oxygen in the air around the work. In any case, this work allows us to observe, indeed to experience the effect of time and ambient chemical conditions. And even after the process of chemical transformation has finished, the work will remind us of its own
'active' time, the time of its self-effected transformation. It is almost impossible to imagine a more beautiful metaphor of the world's constant transformation.
Friedemann Malsch
"Global phenomena fascinate me. Waves, physics, microscopy and macroscopy. It's really astounding that it all works. We are so used to gravity that we find it normal. It would just take a little more or a little less, a small change and this order would no longer exist. That is why I present objects as they are, the fascinating existence of things."
Edith Dekyndt
