This is an abbreviated form of seeing, suitable for everyday use, which tells us as much about the possibilities of seeing as a children’s song played with one finger on the piano tells us about the possibilities of the instrument. I won’t start here with whether we can be sure that these objects exist in space at all. Much of the building blocks that make an object are made up of emptiness and electromagnetic voltages. This is for another day. But if you observe an object over the course of a few hours or a day, you will find that describing its colour, position, movement and stillness is quite complicated. Just the colour of any object in your environment is in a constant state of flux, the soft light red that an everyday object in your kitchen may show in the morning, brightens in the morning, washes out at midday, deepens in the afternoon hours, reflects in its own shadow at dusk, before turning a dull brown, then a grey in the evening, perhaps to be awakened by electric light to a completely different room. You all know the moment just before you decide to switch on the light, perceive this change that gives you a brief dizzying moment of the illusion of sight.
For the painter’s eye, this brief dizziness is the permanent state of the profession. After all, you are not actually seeing “the object”. The object is the result of your brain’s performance, a feat that presupposes that you do not constantly question the process of seeing, just like the illusionary permanence of the table in your dining room or your own person. This existential vertigo that lies before and after the certainty of the object is the space of art, from Thomas Tallis in music to Luc Godard in film to David Hockney to Annette Selle in the visual arts. Our brain weaves assumptions from information that our eyes can transmit to the brain in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum, a small section of this spectrum in the range from approx. 400 nanometres to 780 nanometres. We call this range light. Light – an electromagnetic wave – takes time to propagate. This means that every time we look at an object, an image or a person, we are irrevocably looking back in time. We can only really visualise this on a large scale.
The view into our Milky Way, which has a diameter of 100,000 light years, is a view that goes 100,000 years into the past. In comparison, the view into the past of the luminous blue in Annette Selle’s pictures is a journey into a much more recent past, barely perceptible perhaps, but no less real. The fact remains: everything that reaches us from the world is a sign from the past. The pictures that surround us here today are carriers of light, the medium of a past still in the presence of your direct presence in front of the object. When I talk about Annette Selle’s pictures, I am talking about spaces of light, about colours that are not until they re-emerge in your eyes, in your brain. Pictures that work with this very intention of being a space of light. Here you, the viewer, are the plaything of a double reflection.
Let me take you on another little scientific journey: Your brain works on the assumption that rays of light always propagate in a straight line. For this reason, objects in the reflection of a mirror appear as if they are in a separate room, even if you – standing in front of the mirror or shop window – understand that the light is actually reflected back from a smooth surface. You cannot see this. You cannot dispel this illusion with your knowledge; the mirrored object stands before your eyes “in the mirror”, albeit reversed. At the same time unreachable. But you can utilise this effect when you look at a picture. Stand in front of the picture as if in front of a mirror, close your eyes for a moment, open them again to look not at the picture but into it. this works, you can actually guide your perception in this direction, try it out. And then convince yourself that what you see there is what is reflected onto the surface of the picture from the actual space in which you are standing.
Then you are very close to the secret of the colour and the picture. Then you are in the presence of the “reality of reflection”, the reality of reflection in the present that Godard speaks of. Annette Selle explores – in her own words – precisely this “deep immersion in texture and colour, which fills every room with its presence, which creates access to a mystical energy and leads into a world of reflection and inner peace. The titles of her works hint at this aspect of light, energy and spirit: “The Spirits I Called” and “Angelic”. According to the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word. In it was life, and life was the light of men. These are all quiet, masterful nuances, very soothing in an age that strives for grand, linear explanations. Light and colour speak of a quiet, radiant persistence of an ongoing exploration of perception that is shared by artist and viewer. simple, quiet way to a life well lived, the works speak of this. They are beautiful, complex and simple at the same time. As you walk through this very special exhibition, I wish you inner stillness and a view from your perhaps no longer quite so impermeable, permanent space into these pictorial worlds. And let the pictures reflect themselves in the pictures. What happens when light meets light?
