Page 7 - Art First: Karel Nel: Observe
P. 7
Observe
Elizabeth Burroughs
In Silent Thresholds (2013), the predecessor to the present exhibition,
Karel Nel considered Brancusi’s studio and his own, and the longstand-
ing relationships among makers, their influences serving as prompt for
new thought, visual insight and future projection. Just as the previous body
of works spoke of Nel’s own relationship to artistic tradition, so Observe
is a visual dialogue about his ongoing relationship to science, and to
astronomy in particular: in these works, the Observatory in Helsinki, built
in 1834, serves as scientific counterpart to Nel’s own studio, which he
argues, is his observatory.
In a recent lecture (Helsinki, 2015) to the team of COSMOS astronomers
where he has the role as resident artist, Nel made an elegant case for
1 the fact that the body is implicit in the act of perception: an image of,
say, the Eiffel Tower (1), is merely that to a person who has never been
in Paris. But for someone who has been in that city, the act of looking at
the image results in a mental calculation that attempts to identify the bod-
ily or physical location that would correspond with that particular view.
PAGE 1: Stepped stellar messages detail The alignment of image with experience has a deep connection to a
PAGES 2–3: Stacked images detail physiological ‘GPS’ reading. This same need for a physiological under-
LEFT: Studio as observatory detail standing, Nel argues, is just as important in the astronomers’ reading of
5
