I've seen only a few photos whereas I take it that Luc's work will be "moving" computer art, more like a video than these stills suggest.
I must say, I like the clarity, the strength and apparent simplicity
of the geometrical forms used.
The strength of the impact is partly due to the use of black.
Its intensity contrasts beautifully with the tender greys of the landscape,
in the still; a landscape flooded by sunlight.
The clarity is due to the use of geometric forms.
It would not have done to reduplicate the "expressionist" forms of
the sculptures. Here, these sculptures are hidden, no, not exactly: they
are "almost" hidden, behind the black, geometric shapes.
Being blacked out, so to speak, their vibrating presence is felt only
the stronger.
Luc's geometric shapes constitute a counterpoint; in their totality, to the work we discovered here in the first place. They are a symphony that responds to the symphony of the concrete sculptures distributed in the hollow formed by the slight slopes of two elongated mounds, a hollow that is a sideway extension of a longer and deeper valley...
While the sculptures are integrated into the real landscape, Luc's geometric "sculptures" are integrated into the virtual landscape of the image, the photo taken on location.
Being virtual in a context that does not pretend to be a "realistic representation" (an "Abbild", as they say in German), it is in fact that his black squares, rectangles, and combinations of squares and rectangles destroy or "deconstruct" the naturalistic perception of the landscape.
Despite their black "heaviness" they seem to hover above the ground.
They are "heavy" and "light" at the same time. Strongly present and dreamlike,
therefore fragile.
As in the work of land art we found in Eichstaett, Luc's geometric (virtual)
sculptures have been integrated into the landscape.
They "respond" in different ways to different views of this landscape.
They answer the line of the hill's crest. They take into account the position
of shrubs. They relate, in their structural quality, somehow contrastively
to the soft, tender structure of the grass, as captured by a camera on
a sunny day.
And, what is more, just as the landscape in Eichstaett's figurenfeld valley "accepts" into its bosom each of the sculptures and, at the same time, their totality, Luc's vision of the same place, enhanced by his black squares, rectangles and so on, accentuates one (or the other), of the concrete sculptures photographed. By blotting out the others, by hiding them and letting only their guessed presence touch us, he can focus our view only the more directly on one scuplture, in a given image.
The person entering the figurenfeld, one person, as it were, out of
four on that particular day in Eichstaett when the photos were taken, seems
to be immersed - into what? The process of writing... , after
taking in this or that sculpture; but also: a large number, if not the
entirety of these sculptures, embedded as they are, into the sunny landscape?
As we see him, the writer, we feel he is almost present like a stone, a
sculpture frozen in the course of slow, almost imperceptible movement when
the camera clicked. Being that person myself, trying to record what came
to mind when seeing what I saw, I cannot help feeling that I've been made
"strange," as if blossoming now, having emerged from out of that ground.
An organic "stele"... An addition to the sculptures already present that
fits in as if it had always been there and is going to stay in place....
But you can also look at it in a different way:
the figurenfeld does not exist. What exists are only moments. Every
fragment of a second, another surprise, another view. We change our location,
wandering though this hollow, ascending the slight slopes. Or stepping
back a step or two. Stepping forward. A dance. A stray course, in an unreal
dreamland, a transformed landscape. As the sun wanders, as we change our
position, as the grass bows gently, moving back and forth in the wind,
as the shadows thrown by the clouds wander, as time goes by, there is a
myriads of impressions, there are myriads of views of scupltures transformed
by our eyes' presence. By "experience."
Then, the camera intervenes. Catches this second's view. The person
frozen there, in mid-movement. The shadow frozen, the grass arrested in
its movement. The black squares and rectangles superimposed.
I think to see the TRANSFORMATIONS ADDED by working on this material
(on the shots taken by the camera on that day) is to return to the movement
that was blacked out by the camera.
But I cannot see this today. I see a few stills. I am fascinated, seeing
them.
The work, when I see it, will be a surprise. Will it cause awe, will
it set something within me in motion / as - in its own way - the
figurenfeld with its concrete scupltures, did - at the time? Yes,
I sense I'm in for surprise.