Marble Works (2015–2016) is where Light Phenomena began. Kessler airbrushed the color gradients of skies he had witnessed and photographed (Key West, a storm over the Ifen, a storm on the Hudson River, twilight on Cape Cod) onto slabs of marble and sealed them under clear epoxy resin.
The works set two kinds of time against each other. The gradient holds a few minutes of light, a sunset or a passing storm; the stone beneath it holds millions of years of geology, pressure and sediment, visible as the veins that now run through the painted sky. Marble adds a third history. For more than two thousand years it has been one of the central materials of art production, from classical sculpture to the luxury surfaces of hotels and banks, and it carries different meanings across cultures: permanence, power, the sacred, wealth. The Marble Works use that material as a point of reflection, a found piece of geology that is already an art-historical object, overlaid with the most fleeting image there is.
In 2019 the stone returned in Weißer Fleck auf der Landkarte (the race to the North Pole), where the routes of the expeditions to the North Pole are laser-cut into black marble. From the marble slabs the project moved on to Objects of Unbelonging, where the same airbrushed gradient is applied to fossils, corals and minerals, and then to the alu-dibond panels and the book that make up Light Phenomena today.
Works
Installation views
Forever and Sunsmell, Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt, 2019. Installation views.
In the studio
