Hans Kotter’s light-cases present colorful and graphic sculptures with a rhythmic structure. The wealth of new forms and concepts they unfold is at the same time playful and conceptual. Only keener observation reveals that they reflect reality by transforming the present. Only close inspection enables us to discern the photos and images.

Staging the objects amounts to a transformation of space itself. As with stained-glass painting in the past, luminosity functions here to transmute and enchant. In opposition to what comes to view in medieval spaces with their religious iconography and metaphysics of light, the object of representation is a mere detail and therefore secondary. We see no more than fields or suspended rays of light created by enlarged takes of Murano glass in the 50‘s and 60‘s.

The radiation of light appears artificial. And the object itself is free of all possible function. The luminous bodies transform into autonomous beings: sculptures of light changing not only the color of space, but also restructuring it, dividing, delimiting, blocking, opening, tilting it and giving it new rhythm. The use of montage gives the colored surface, the stripes and patterns and the scintillating effects an autonomy which detaches them from the object of representation. The object is neither documented, nor is there any suggestion of traces of it left behind in memory. The art of photography stands at the service of a multicolored light-painting. The sculptural aspect reaches out into space, creating independent and differentiated bodies: suspended objects of light, lying or mounted on the wall.

Also in the Gothic window the relation between a spatial body and a light-surface plays an essential role. In Hans Kotter’s work the details of painting in all their precision and refinement are no longer discernible. They fade away in the luminosity of the whole. Gothic archtitecture finds itself at the service of light surfaces. It reduces form to a skeleton and imbibes space with the magic of light.

Since quite some time Kotter’s luminous bodies have moved away from the format of the image and its traditional space on the wall. However, they do not entirely deny their origin in the surface. His work is a dialogue and interaction with a given space leading to an intense and active transformation of the space itself.

The most important components in this process are the viewer and the course taken and traced by him around the objects. The dark and structurally transformed space extends the habitual experience of space to a new level. The viewer is a wanderer at the beginning of a meditative journey to an unknown world. As the sculptures of light transform into architectural objects, a „city of tomorrow“ emerges.

Dr. Markus Wimmer