TOUCHING THE VOID

Feddersen‘s play with forms draws on the multitude of perspectives. A small head peeks from a metre-high vase while resting on the brittle collar of the vessel. It is a man with the appearance of an exhausted newborn. Next to this fragile place of tranquillity stands a column of unfired clay: a phallus traversed by a fissure. The construction almost threatens to break apart. A discourse on the original gender opens up here at the expense of the material.

The third sculpture demonstrates creation‘s victory over the archetype. A cylinder with a slightly dented wall counteracts the ideal of harmony and wholeness. This renders the Enso three-dimensional, the perfectly rounded circle of Japanese calligraphy. To practice it daily is supposed to bring strength and eventually satori as its production strives for the ideal and illustrates its unattainability at the same time.

The model of a bust, unfinished and raw, eventually approximates a personal archetype of the artist. Ghostly pale, as if scared of the world, it cowers on its vibrantly coloured pedestal. Like a last vestige of a self-portrait it manifests Bergson’s word of the “eternally uncreated” in a mutated form the expression of which remains constantly in motion and contradicts the rigid idea of a beginning and an ending.

In four sculptures Dennis Feddersen illustrates the sculptor‘s tragedy: materialisation will always remain an attempt, an insufficient copy of the primal idea. Yet only in this manner can he bring rudimentary elements of the archetype to the surface, which by expressing a collective past enable the present in the first place. The exhibition thus also addresses the Platonic sense of archetype as a “beginning” or an “arrival”: the artist fathoms his own origin, exposes its replica to the audience – and thus opens up a new reading in the now.