Christian Herdeg’s works oscillate between function and impression, using large-format coloured light fields and geometric basic forms to make the optical and physical properties of light a sensual experience.
Christian Herdeg is one of the pioneers of light art in Europe– for more than fifty years he has been dealing with the different properties of light and brings the affinity for minimalism anchored in the medium into harmony with a unique colour poetry. In search of a new aesthetic, Herdeg stages light and colour in all their facets, parallels and contrasts. Herdeg skilfully counteracts the natural property of light to spread out, yes, he designs the light itself, locks it up and thus opens up new spaces for it.
The play with opposites and contradictions makes Christian Herdeg’s works striking and beguiling: When light can be experienced spatially, geometric reduction meets coloured poetry and materiality meets immateriality.
Herdeg makes impressive use of its formative power and its painterly qualities in the prominently placed “Spaghettini” of argon and neon tubes. The light tubes bundled like stalks amaze with their irregular arrangement, which seems to slightly break out of Herdeg’s sober formal vocabulary.
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Christian Herdeg’s works oscillate between function and impression, using large-format coloured light fields and geometric basic forms to make the optical and physical properties of light a sensual experience.
Christian Herdeg is one of the pioneers of light art in Europe– for more than fifty years he has been dealing with the different properties of light and brings the affinity for minimalism anchored in the medium into harmony with a unique colour poetry. In search of a new aesthetic, Herdeg stages light and colour in all their facets, parallels and contrasts. Herdeg skilfully counteracts the natural property of light to spread out, yes, he designs the light itself, locks it up and thus opens up new spaces for it.
The play with opposites and contradictions makes Christian Herdeg’s works striking and beguiling: When light can be experienced spatially, geometric reduction meets coloured poetry and materiality meets immateriality.
Herdeg makes impressive use of its formative power and its painterly qualities in the prominently placed “Spaghettini” of argon and neon tubes. The light tubes bundled like stalks amaze with their irregular arrangement, which seems to slightly break out of Herdeg’s sober formal vocabulary. However, if attention is turned to the diffuse atmospheric effect when the light hits the wall, the creative aspect of Herdeg’s work becomes visible, creating a painterly color gradient on the wall surface.
It was in the mid-seventies that Christian Herdeg discovered a language of shapes – reduced, but packed with meaning – that still characterises his work today, with the “Step-On” series of floor objects, in each of which he covers a continuous light tube describing a rectangle with a massive metal slab. The tubes and the slabs are positioned so that the massive load from the flat but compact block floats on a cushion of light. Aside from the contradictory materials, the peculiar effect of these floor objects is due to precise deployment of the neon or argon light tubes. The tubes, colour and light properties engage in a subtle dialogue with the materials of the slabs that weigh them down.
The different ‘aggregate states’ and above all the spatial dimensions of light and colour have always been central to Christian Herdeg’s works.
In “Round about Midnight” a cube of transparent acrylic glass with argon light tubes running diagonally through its interior, he creates a vivid synthesis of corporeal and ephemeral presences, with a geometrical order and multiplying spatial expansions that seem virtually endless. One implied, optional aspect of these earlier works is crucial to the works from the late seventies: light layering and lightspace measurement.
Herdeg impressively combines neon and black light tubes with monochrome colored surfaces in the “Granny Smith” works as well as in “Magic Circle” or “Small Disc Ultramarine Orange”. The planar surface acts expanding or limiting and creates a balance between emanation and absorption of the light.
The imagery of these objects oscillates between material object and immaterial color lighting design. The optical color spaces created in this way look as picturesque as a painting. Christian Herdeg sums up this extremely present quality when he says that the tubes are his pencils.
