Bojan Šarčević
BQ, Cologne, Germany
Two films, one in black and white the other in colour, showing a few minutes in the studio: in a concentrated movement, they suck in a number of sculptures, geometric constructions made of smooth sheets of colourless perspex. Points, corners, spikes – a crystalline landscape, clearly and coolly arranged, the backdrop for a few pans and cuts. The light gilds diagonals, breaks on inclined surfaces, and sometimes frames dark edges in a blinding glare. In stills, the edges become lines and, where the camera focuses on a crooked surface, the picture distorts according to the laws of perspective. The black and white images are accompanied by percussive sounds, the colour version by the discreet tinkling of a piano; the music is retro-experimental, vaguely recalling the cultural programming of 1950s public television. But did anyone ever broadcast footage of sculptures with so little comment? And with such agreeable sounds?
Compared with his films, the spaces Bojan Šarčević has constructed for these projections at BQ, Cologne, are more substantial: interlocking partitions support the two projectors, one pointing its lens through a hole in the wall into a darkened room, the other half-hidden, half on a pedestal. Together they add up to a shimmering, whirring image-machine that one can enter like an elegant projectionist’s booth. The white, constructivist architectures recall Tatlin and Rodchenko, or even the frozen dreams of the ABC-group architects. In front of Šarčević’s two new films, one can submit to nostalgia for the magic of celluloid: this is what it might have looked like, back when cinecameras were still blithely pointed at goodness and beauty in any form; an earlier age, before the links between sculpture and electronic image had been subjected to art-historical fine-tuning.
Šarčević insists that these pictures should be shown as a film only. There are no other copies of the material, and no further versions are planned. The small sculptures are no longer important; he keeps them in his studio like an old stage set, a few dusty props. As wafer-thin, transparent sheets of plastic they have migrated to even thinner, lucid film stock. The light from the projector bulb hits the celluloid in just the same way as the light captured on film gets caught in the perspex – a hall of mirrors, then, in which motif and material indissolubly entwine.
Catrin Lorch
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
