Galatea

Galatea has no stable pictorial colour in the conventional sense. The entire surface of the canvas is treated with a chrome-effect pigment that reflects a substantial portion of the incident light. Its metallic-silver base tone remains a material condition, while the visible chromatic image arises from the surroundings. Walls, light sources, bodies and movements temporarily inscribe themselves into the surface.

The blue-grey, golden and dark appearances in the photographed view are therefore not fixed colour fields within the painting. They belong to a particular spatial and optical situation. In another room, under different light or from a different position, the same surface produces another image. Galatea retains its material structure while its appearance is continually formed anew.

The title refers to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which shaped matter becomes a living presence. The work transfers this passage into the present tense of viewing. It depicts no fixed figure; the body before the canvas is what appears within it. Viewers lend the work a living form for a moment, yet the pigment does not return them neutrally or in full. Their image changes with distance, angle and movement.

Galatea thereby redistributes the roles of the myth. Neither does a sovereign creator bring a passive object to life, nor does the viewer remain outside the work. The material determines how the body can appear, while the body activates the optical possibilities of the surface. Galatea is neither the object alone nor the person facing it. The name designates the moment in which the two enter into relation.

This appearance emerges from the relation between light, matter, space and body. Different people encounter the same physical surface, yet never see the same image. Within the Fields of Experience, perception itself becomes the subject of the work: not the passive reception of an already completed reality, but a situated process through which world and consciousness bring one another into appearance.

Galatea does not come alive once and for all. The work emerges anew with every encounter—from a materially constant surface and an image that exists only for the duration of a particular relation.