Concave horizon. Jan Dibbets and Perception of Architecture

Abstract

In the face of architecture, a metaphor that mediates between immensity and intimacy, we become completely sensory beings, not only visual organisms. A continuous tension exists between the reality of its material and tectonic construction, and the abstract, idealized and spiritual dimension of its artistic imagery. In the same way, a photograph of a built space contains two interiors: the interior of the image and the inner world of the viewers themselves. All images, as visual objects, are sensed as an inner experience that echoes out onto the realms of the public and the diverse. A transfer of feelings and ideas takes place, one that, in contemporary art, is as crucial as it is misunderstood. The photographic work of Jan Dibbets analyses the communication of this duality: the tension between central and peripheral vision, the multiplicity of perspectives, the intellectualization of the straight line, the sequence of interpretations, the intersections of the magnetism of beauty... Since it is the result of the active tension between perception and representation, the void is generated between a central point— emphasized as the constructor of the image and not as the physical location of the subject—and the arch where the sequences of what is visible take place. This distance inevitably separates experience from physical nature. It is a concave horizon tensed by the dispersion and gravity of the circular order, between what is recognizable and what is known intuitively.