Periskop

Periskop belongs to the Skopein group of works, whose title derives from the ancient Greek word for seeing and examining. The group considers perception across different scales, instruments and directions of view. In Periskop, several technical modes of seeing converge: illumination, optical redirection and radiographic penetration.

Against the black ground, reminiscent of a chalkboard, the linear outlines of two vehicles face one another. A yellow and a blue cone of light extend from them. Both widen towards the centre of the image and meet at a dark vertical threshold. The field of vision therefore belongs to no single observer. Two mobile positions direct their projections towards one another without merging into a shared perspective.

Below the cones of light, this encounter returns in pictorial form. A black, organic-mechanical concentration and a coloured landscape occupy two bright fields displaced against one another. Like the light cones above, they bring together different directions and fragments of reality. The optical arrangement is thus translated into a question of painting: every image is a limited field of vision originating from a particular standpoint. Where two such fields meet, a further reality emerges that belongs to neither perspective alone.

From the lower edge of the image rises the transparent form of a bent leg. The brightly emerging bones and visible joint recall an X-ray. While the beams make surfaces visible through illumination and the periscope spatially redirects a line of sight, the X-ray penetrates the body’s outer boundary. Visibility arises under different conditions in each case: through light, through redirection or through technical penetration into a hidden structure.

The double arrow beside the handwritten word “Periskop” marks the shift between different heights and levels of observation. The work connects this vertical change of view with the horizontal encounter of the two light cones and the staggered pictorial fields below. Seeing appears not as immediate access to a reality that already exists in complete form, but as a relational process. Periskop shows how directions of view encounter, limit and transform one another—and how something becomes perceptible only between bodies, instruments and images.