Dirk Salz (1962, Bochum, Germany) is interested in simple forms and color transparency, playing with impressions of depth, which are not imposed through planes or complex compositions, but through their reduction. #2521 (2020) is a good example of this.
His images are placed on smooth surfaces that serve as metaphorical mirrors for the viewer, mirrors that reflect the viewer’s own image within the space, and the possibilities of our relationship to it.
His works open up an experience of shifting between their various depths and planes, but at the same time hold our own place next to them, not within them.
Because the concept of reflection is inherent to Dirk’s artistic investigation of space. In addition to exploring space, Salz’s works impose on us a question of temporality and the role of time in our perception of space.
Time is a category that comes before space, which is necessarily more internal and allows outer space to be revealed.
Dirk Salz’s painted works contain geometrically formed structures that lie hidden beneath their surfaces. They are extremely glossy, sealed with varnish on the outside, bringing both the environment and the viewer into their interiors. These paintings – if we can simply refer to Dirk Salz’s pieces as “paintings” – have great depth. This is the result of the specific material Salz has been using for years.
His method of painting does not have much in common with the traditional notion of applying paint with a brush on canvas, paper or wood. The artist spreads a number of layers of epoxy resin (more or less thick) enriched with paint pigments on multiplex plates. The epoxy resin is a transparent material and creates the effect that the viewer’s gaze penetrates the work through the real spatial depth.
What the artist wants is to encourage, even force the viewer to look closer, an effect he achieves thanks to his technique. Then we discover the composition as well as the colors of the piece. At first glance it is difficult to tell which lines, shapes and levels of depth are part of the work and which are mere reflections. To be able to distinguish it is necessary to move, seeing the piece from different angles and distances.
