Summary
Artist Statement
From the 18th century through to the late 19th century, paintings of the ‘sublime’ became a popular genre in Western art. These works were intended to illicit feelings of awe, even terror, in the viewer, often in the name of moral improvement. Impending or immediate calamity was a staple of the genre, with big paintings depicting nature as a vast, malevolent force and humans as its hapless victims. This ‘uber’ nature was in turn subordinate to the supernatural in the form of a vengeful God. Now, in the early 21st century, our world has shrunk and nature looks more in danger from humans and their technology than the other way around. It has been argued that technology, its consequences and our imaginings of it, is a more likely location for the sublime today.
I conceived the series of works of which ‘5.49’ is one as an abstract tool for imaging the moments following a vast cataclysmic event; ‘5.19’, ‘5.34’ and ‘5.49’ are seconds in a twilight haze, passing without humans to notice their passage. Like the sublime painters of the 18th and 19th centuries, I try to use the known to represent our fear of the unknowable. So hard is it for us to conceive of a world without us and our imagining that I suggest tools operating at a level below perception might just be useful for the task.
The artworks in this series employ optics – refraction, kinetic colour, luminance, diminishing reflection etc. – to produce a type of mesmeric visual reverberation. Drawing on aspects of the painted sublime and 20th-century minimalism and psychotherapy, they aim to investigate the idea of therapeutic abstraction.
Alexander Knox
