Scan paintings
Video, installation shot, 2016 / images (c) Michael Wegerer
There are rare dark nights at midsummer in the northern hemisphere and the days are full of immaterial colours and light. On a sunny summer day in June 2014 I had the idea to capture the sky's light. Every full hour, within a duration of 24 hours, the sky's light was scanned by using a common A4 hand scanner. A series of digital but painterly images emerged. This 24 min video is showing the light's change of colours.
Sky's light , 2014 (screen print on japanese paper, aluminium foil)
Michael Wegerer's approach to painting leads one to the phenomenon of light.
The so-called Scan Paintings were created from digitally image-scans. In this case the artist makes scans of all sorts of light and enlarges and prints them on transparent paper, lending them the quality of paintings which is how Wegerer refers to the works. To create the original, painting-like Impression also yielded by spontaneous effects and imperfections Wegerer first applies a gold background to the paper.
Found In Byzantine art and later in the Middle Ages, this element is of great importance and highly symbolic. The gold background lends Wegerer's pictures a particularly warm glow and creates as does the glaze technique taken from the old masters - a spatial depth. In his works Michael Wegerer uses the gold priming also found in medieval book, icon and panel illustration to raise religious content to a more general spiritual level.
In the Scan Paintings the artist combines traditional and contemporary effects. He transforms image spaces permeated with mute colors and wave-like forms into contemplative energy fields, shifting the digitally parsed prismatic nature of light back to a kind of transcendent order.
(Text: Hartwig Knack, art historian and curator, 2014)
Neon, 2014
(screen print, japanese paper, gold leaf, 400 x140cm)
Glass detail, 2012 (screen print, tracing paper, aliminium foil, 200 x70cm)
Mirror, 2012 (screen print, tracing paper, aluminium foil, 200x140cm)
photographers (c) Birgit & Peter Kainz, Jeff Wolf, Michael Wegerer
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