Watermans: The Bright Sky by Gints Gabrans

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Gints creates images by breaking a laser beam inside a drop of water

Watermans present, The Bright Sky, an exhibition of a new style of paintings created by Gints Gabrans, an eminent contemporary artist from Latvia, who works mainly with installations and new media.

The Bright Sky, is a series of works, investigating the art of light, which the artist has termed ‘photon* painting’ whereby he creates images by breaking a laser beam inside a drop of water.

The beam is reflected through the drop in the surrounding space taking a huge leap of scale, while at the same time the reflected white light of a RGB laser beam disperses into all colours of the spectrum. The resulting projection is then fixed on a light sensitive surface – photo paper.

After processing the paper with photochemistry a unique laser made ’photon painting’ is created. It is one of its kind and has its surface informatively packed with traces left by photon (light quanta).   Each projection captures an amplification of the microscopic processes of light's electromagnetic wave interference allowing us to look into the mysterious nature of light waves. Visually it resembles a network of unknown worlds by showing the "dark", invisible side of the light.

At first the perceived image resembles abstract art but there is nothing abstract about it. The image is created from a very small point of light which has been increased to a scale where our eyes are able to view the insight of the light - the light itself. These are the landscapes of another world, which on a daily basis are hidden from our sight. "I call it an extended realism,” says the artist.

Gints Gabrans work has been widely exhibited in West Europe, Australia and America, and he won the Hansabank Art Award (2005), and presented Latvia at the Venice Biennale in 2007, with his project, Paramirrors (about the changing states of awareness produced by light. Specifically, polarised light reflected by mirrors)

In his work Gabrans explores unsteady borderline between the artificial (‘art’) construction and reality itself.

April 29, 2010