Ecce homo Lothar Baumgarten, 2002

"My work is not a matter of strategy or way of thinking. It is based rather on principles guided by intuition. The tools of my thinking are measurement and proportion, and fundamental to my artistic practice are a grammar that reflects elementary spatial relationships and a rational awareness of timing and emphasis. It is about the sensual qualities inherent in the body of space, their materialization and their form. My works are not installations, they are not conceptual: it is art that does not ignore its architectural context. The work takes shape by integrating given structures into a complex whole and creating a canon of references between individual and circumstantial elements. It is a dialectical process where a critical discourse with contemporary culture reveals within itself an architectural structure. Content becomes form. My critical-cultural approach does not aim to propose autobiographical solutions to universal problems. I believe that art should encourage us to question the status quo and the structures that allow it to persist.
”

— Lothar Baumgarten, “Arte all’Arte VII”, 2002

On the occasion of the VII edition of Arte all’Arte, curator Emanuela de Cecco invited Lothar Baumgarten to participate in the Church of San Francesco in Montalcino with the work Ecce Homo.

"(…) His presence at Arte all’Arte takes shape in the Church of San Francesco in Montalcino and in the adjacent cloister. In the church, Baumgarten installed 25 black-and-white slide projections: shop windows from the town and other nearby settlements, details of food items, animals, candles, thorns… With the customary precision and formal elegance that has always characterized his work, the artist arranged his images taking into account both the physical structure of the church and the internal organization of the space in relation to the performance of religious functions.

Baumgarten introduces into a space historically devoted to worship the signs of the contemporary city, where the logic of commerce is, in fact, the driving force behind most processes of transformation. The shop windows—carefully arranged, elegant, and well-stocked—emerge like ghosts in the dimly lit space that hosts them, suggesting a stark contrast with the abandoned condition of the latter. Presented in this context, they become true icons of a secularized daily life devoted to consumption.

This installation is echoed by the intervention in the cloister adjacent to the church, where 30 colored circles in Renaissance palette tones coexist with other mirrored circles designed to reflect the faces of the viewers themselves. The image disappears, leaving the field open to the more essential geometric forms. The artist thus looks to tradition but offers a complex vision of it—nothing could be further from rhetorical or naïve revivalism. Baumgarten therefore subtly suggests a critical reflection on two different ways of enacting relationships between history, everyday life, memory, and the present."

Emanuela De Cecco, “Arte all’Arte VII”, 2002

Credits

Lothar Baumgarten
Ecce Homo, 2002
25 slide projections inside the church / 25 diaproiezioni all’interno della chiesa
Montalcino, Arte all’Arte VII
Photo Ela Bialkowska

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