Aussichtslos

Aussichtslos
Cyanotype • 150 cm x 200 cm and 150 cm x 150 cm • 2023

Sunday, 04.06.2023, 09:15 – 09:35, looking for holes in the cloudy morning sky, the artist waits for the sun. The 150 cm x 200 cm watercolour paper was coated with the light-reactive solution and dried. The acrylic glass panel in the same format is already on top. A self-adhesive window film bearing the motif is laminated onto it – an unusual self-portrait of the artist, in black on transparent film. Everything is protected from light and packed in a large-format cardboard box so that it can be handed overto the development process, the sun, as soon as it appears. The approximately 25 kg were lovingly dragged over the stone gravel. Now the time had come, the sun appeared, the tension rose, and the moment had arrived. The box is opened, the sunlight falls through the adhesive foil, past the black negative, onto the coated watercolour paper and it begins. In a few seconds, the light yellow-greenish surface reacts and turns more and more silver-green until it reaches a deep, dark green-blue after almost 20 minutes. Now it has to be quick – every second counts. The 25 kg acrylic glass plate must be removed from the paper and the paper placed in a wash-out basin or a garden pond without any further reaction time. There, the unreacted solution can be washed out and the Prussian blue developed. One of the oldest printing processes, realized in large format, contextualized in the awareness of cyclical time, full of respect for the large and small cycles of life.