March 01, 2010

Shadow of a cup of coffee, nr. 9

Shadow of a coffee after lunch with Anny and Christian.
Once again, I helped myself with a grey tone to solve the struggle between the saucer, the shadow of the saucer, and the part of the shadow of the cup that's on the saucer ... otherwise I would have preserved just the shadow of the ensemble cup+saucer, like in Coffee Shadow nr. 6.


L'ombre d'un café après une excellente souris d'agneau chez nos amis Anny et Christian.
Comme je l'ai déjà mentionné avant-hier - au moins dans les textes allemand et anglais - je me demande à chaque fois si je dois "colorier" l'endroit où la tasse touche le papier - d'un côté, cet endroit devrait évidemment être noir, car la lumière n'y arrive pas - mais d'un autre côté, quand on regarde l'ombre de la tasse, cet endroit-là n'en fait pas vraiment partie, car il est couvert par ... la tasse.
Donc, la dernière fois je l'ai "colorié" en gris.
Cette fois-ci, mon doute s'est étendu à l'ombre de la soucoupe.
Si je dessine uniquement l'ombre de la soucoupe, je perds le plaisir de l'ombre de la tasse dans la soucoupe. Or si je ne dessine pas l'ombre de la soucoupe - pour préserver la totalité de l'ombre de la tasse - je dois renoncer à une partie trop importante de mon sujet...
Alors j'ai encore une fois fait le compromis d'un mélange entre les deux - peut-être pas très logique, peut-être pas assez conséquent, mais moi je me comprends...


Schatten eines Kaffees nach einem exzellenten Mittagessen bei Freunden.


13 x 21 cm (5 x 8 1/4 in.)

4 comments:

Lorena said...

Is this Conceptual art? Or does it come from some intuitive place? or is it done on a whim? I just love these drawings and find it so curious that you live in the south of France surrounded by beauty in a time of excessive material production of goods, and you choose to draw the shadows of everyday objects, extradinary.What would Baudrillard say?

Werner said...

Lorena,
Thank you very much for your questions.
The more I draw just shadows, the more I love them.
Probably all of your suggestions are true ...
Well, I don't know if you mention Baudrillard just for the joke's sake, or if you're a hardcore Baudrillard aficionado - but my use of shadows isn't based on the Baudrillarian dichotomy of reality and simulacra, and trying to use it to contribute to that discussion would probably end up ridiculing it by taking it too literally: One may say, for example, that the drawing of a shadow of a cup of coffee, captured by a camera and transmitted through the internet to be displayed on a monitor in a different time-space, is the idea of coffee, virtualized by several levels, where the original subject of the drawing - a cup of coffee - gets completely dissolved in the discourse...

That's some kind of argumentation that I'd prefer to leave up to art critics or philosophy round tables.

Instead, your remark about drawing shadows of everyday objects comes much closer to my approach indeed.
Does the shadow tell you more about the cup of coffee or ... about the light source? Or the place where I've been?
In this drawing for example, you can see that I was outdoors (sharp contours => shadow due to sunlight), that the sun was not very high in the sky (medium long shadows), that I was probably looking in eastern direction, and so on...

Lorena said...

Hey Werner, I thoroughly enjoyed your response. I was sincere and not joking about Baudrillard. What I was referring to was more along the lines of the hyperreal. By drawing the shadows it's as if the cup and it's contents were elevated on to an alter of the commonplace. I loved the simple use of materials; paper and pencil, as well as the simple yet complex idea of drawing the shadows and light.I'm also intrigued by what is in you as a contemporary artist,hooked up to the internet, that is drawn to this sort of deconstructed simplicity. While there is so much more to discuss on the subject, I also see your work in a historic context. The coffee cup being somewhat of a global economic driver, a modern ritual, many in the world partake of that goes back centuries. I'm not sure if I would have felt the same about the shadows of a water bottle, but who can say.It is also interesting that I'm enjoying these from the hyperreal perspective while I sense that you are creating them from a hyper rational place. I just adored your time space analysis,the idea of coffee- along the lines of El Bulli and the foams. Well thanks for indulging me, what an interesting guy you are

Werner said...

Thanks again Lorena.
Not sure if I understand all the facets of your comment - I'll have to read some more Baudrillard to check out his theories of the hyperreal.
But before that, I'm going to dive deeper into Alexandre Hollan - bought a collection of his notes, interviews and reflections recently...