carel balth

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introduction

The Gift of Perception

Videowatercolors 2001 - present

• To create a photograph, a painting or a film is to select from the infinite possibilities that exist, and to combine conditions of time, space and light culled from a dynamic continuum.
  A Videowatercolor is first a digital video of a specific location in certain conditions of time and light. While filming, the idea in respect to the intrinsic content of the work undergoes continual development, in turn influencing the filming process. Images are then chosen from the digital media by repeatedly pausing the moving pixels. From the considered arrangement of images into new, conceptual combinations, a virtual image starts to develop. The final image is then printed on canvas.

• The video stills for each work are selected from the approximately 50,000 frames in the videos filmed for that purpose. This method multiplies and intensifies the possibilities for building up the image-- options that become innumerable as the stills are digitally merged. This allows the viewer to regard the entirety as a single image and to be simultaneously made aware of its constituent parts. The flipping of perception can lead to an exciting personal interplay with the work that is both visual and cerebral. New media thus renders it possible to shift the parameters of aesthetic perception and discover new visual experiences. Over a period of seven years, a body of meta-paintings has emerged that visualizes broader connotations of perspective. The works utilize the sensory world in such a way that they acquire meaning beyond the immediate visual context of 'the picture.'

An example:
Skyscape (Blue Horizon) appears to be the ultimate landscape but it is a landscape of 'nothingness,' that consists only of water, ice and clouds. his landscape without land was filmed through the iced-over window of an airplane as it flew into a storm. The upper and lower halves of the landscape were taken at different points in time, then merged into a single image. The horizon divides not only space but time. Abstractions of time, space and light becomes the apparent reality. Because it is not and could not be a landscape, it is the idea of a landscape that is experienced by the viewer.

• Through non-traditional media, Videowatercolors renew both the idea and form of collage by seamlessly linking moments in time into a new kind of image. They are created with digital technology, but without disruptive manipulation of the image. They retain their original simplicity and stem directly from reality.
  At once the viewer's eye is attracted to what is recognizable in the work, its realistic element. But as a whole the image constitutes another mode of abstraction. Its forms could never exist in reality because it is a collage composed of separate time frames. This different approach leads to a more intimate, human experience of its meaning; less specific, more general, and therefore more abstract. I find it compelling to grapple with these issues in an adventurous and poetic context.