Born in Stuttgart in 1967, Elger Esser is the youngest member of the renowned German photographic school, whose members have studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher.
A photographer with incredible painterly sensibility, the undisputed master of rarefaction in landscapes where art and nature are bound closely together, his research has added emotion to the documentary approach of the Bechers’ research, while remaining faithful to the conceptual sense of photography and the value of memory imparted by his illustrious teachers, ever-loyal supporters of his work.
The exhibition “De Sublime” includes 28 works which represent the most important chapters in his whole career: landscapes and views¸ in which light and framing expand the gaze towards the infinite, in an expansion that is both dreamlike and unsettling; his postcards and heliographic photographs, where his use of early 20th century postcards which he then reprocessed, or images made to resemble paintings with the heliographic technique, appear like fragments of collective memories; the series dedicated to the incredible Garden of Ninfa, which reveals itself in Esser’s painterly shots, suspended between micro and macro visions, between blurring and sharpness, harking back to the nineteenth-century tradition of naturalistic painting and archeological landscape painting, with the compositional presence of the ruins; right up to the latest creative process of this great artist. Like a present-day alchemist, he continues his endless research even during post-production, which is carried out strictly by hand, experimenting with prints on copper and silver and the effects of oxidization on various highlights.
There is a common thread running through his entire output: the authenticity of research, which invites us to reconsider photography as an element of originality, and redefine its boundaries.
The result of painstaking research and preparation, the location and framing of each of his works become themselves part of that specific moment which is the perfect time, not to mention a well-defined, rigorous space: space and time are the two coordinates which make up his photographs. Indeed, Esser’s poetics becomes manifest when faced with the magnificence of nature, its beauty, the vastness of its spaces, where the sense of the sublime allows the individual to experience infinity. Contemplating such a spectacle leads the mind to become conscious of its own rational limit, and recognize the possibility of a dimension beyond the realm of the senses, to be experienced on a purely emotional level.
In Esser’s works, the confines of the present moment and defined place, the “here and now”, are dilated until they become lost in infinity, in an expanded sphere between the dimensions of time and space, where the spectator loses his own confines and bearings, but rediscovers the inner, intimate experience of the profound sense of reality and of its endless beauty.
• 9 June 2017 at 6:30 PM : lecture by Elger Esser, The memory, a reflection in the photographic image. A special encounter with Elger Esser to discover the fundamentals of his aesthetic research.
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