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From and To / Elongated View.
Light over Horizon
(sunset to nautical twilight).
Moonlit Disk.
The Painter's Eye.
Infinity Measured.
Continuum.
As Opposed To.
Here and Now.
Single View.
Historical Record.
Untitled.
First Spectrum. edition
Spectrum.
Gravity Matters.
Astronomers Series.
Exhibition Views &
Exhibition Catalogues
Each accompanying title attentively refers the depicted person by surname, his or hers professional title, and the shared (generalized) profession of astronomer, as well as the portrait genre itself.
The first and foremost function of the portrait is to demonstrate the existence of an individual person; of a unique being, lifted from the masses, saved from the unrelenting onward character of time.
The Astronomers Series is a work intended to explore and test this function, by way of simultaniously increasing and decreasing the significance of the individual.
A consideration on the evolved intelligence which enables the human being to trace back his existence to its cosmological origin, and the sheer consequence of this knowledge for man's own consciousness, is embedded in the standardized portrait genre, through the depiction of 7 astronomers who explore, map and research the outer world on a daily basis.
In this work the depicted scientists become the emblematic unification of the contradictions between uniquity and exchangeability, between the finite and the infinite, between earth life and the very vast outer space.
And it is the latter which reveals the work's final aspiration, since the Astronomers Series is a work as much about looking outward, as it is about looking inward, at a moderate sized 4,5 billion year old planet and its miraculously evolved human inhabitants.
1 2 installation views
© Simon van Til
2007
framed C-print
80x63 cm.