Saturn and Melancholy

Dust is the primary signifier in this work –images with dust, images of dust. In space, dust evokes the melancholy of the Sublime as raw material of all celestial phenomena, ultimate beginnings. On Earth, however, dust famously denotes decay, oblivion, ultimate endings. No wonder Walter Benjamin chose dust as the metaphor for the rundown state of dreams in modernity. 

On one side, an abstraction of splattered graphite dust, dripped, spread and fixed. On the other a photographic composition of thousands of Cassini raw images of Saturn arranged in a grid. Each side of the work mirrors the other using different media and materials. The grid and drip evoking two poles of abstract expression in the work’s play with symmetry – or lack thereof. The structure’s strong bilateral symmetry resembles a giant Rorschach test, making an indirect link to another domain where melancholy prevails—the psycho-medical field.