This installation is made out of many plastic dots hanging from the ceiling and filling up the space, through which the visitor can walk. The dots are coloured with the primary colors of the prints, yellow, magenta and cyan.
When looking at the installation through a small hole at the end of the room though, the whole space takes an unexpected turn: all the dots come together making the shape of an eye. The primary colors create an illusion of different colors when mixed together, just as a normal printer does.
The idea of the artist was precisely this: to let the people wonder around a space that is impossible to get through otherwise, the space of the micro-particles of a printed paper. The artist himself said in an interview how “The original idea was about decomposing an image, separating it into its minimal particles, so that a person could walk into it and become a part of a molecular, almost atomic world—inhabiting the space that exists between ink dots suspended in space. I say that the idea was old because I remember being a kid and staring at advertisements and at magazines with a magnifying glass and realizing that there was a whole system of blue, magenta, and yellow dots making up all the visible colors. I used to love getting lost in those dots and in the empty space between them. I wanted to know: What was this space?”
The visitors have then the fantastic opportunity to explore a microscopic space inacessible otherwise. The individual can feel part of the molecules and as little as a particle in the universe. Aren’t we just particles in the universe after all?
M.C.
Bibliography and further readings:
ORTEGA Damian, Damian Ortega – Reading Landscapes, Kukje Gallery Inc, 2015
Zoom On Contemporary Art 