The German artist Stephan Reusse utilises a host of cutting edge technological processes and media to create his art. At the core of his creations are the notions of perception and remembrance. Using laser installation, thermographic photography and videography, the artist blurs the boundaries between what the viewer is seeing, has seen and now simply remembers.
In his laser installation series Reusse focuses on the subject of mice which permeate urban buildings with high levels of nocturnal activity. A light beam laser projects the traces and outlines of the animals onto the walls. The forms were developed from the analysis of video recordings taken of mice. The resulting movement patterns and forms are a result of film animation undertaken by the artist. The artist extracts from real footage only the line and the form, so although there is a sharp accuracy to the animal’s movement, the resulting image is of an abstracted nature, diluting the immediacy of the subject.
For Reusse the mouse acts as a metaphor for human behaviour: particularly characteristic in the laser projections are the nervous, hectic, frightened and restless movements of the mice which are in many ways reflective of everyday human life. The works speak of fugacity and how fleeting the world and its forms are. The mice move so quickly that by the time conscious recognition of form has taken place, they are gone and the viewer’s perception has turned to an act of remembrance. This is heightened by Reusse’s technical approach, which presents only a few scurrying traces of lines, they act as a partial symbol of something.
In Reusse’s thermographic photographic and videorecording works the artist captures the trace of a body or animal by employing heat sensitive technology. The resulting images therefore partially correspond to physical form but more importantly to temperature. So what on first glance seems to be a heavily blurred figure asleep in bed is actually a profoundly scientific rendering of that form’s entire body temperature interacting with a cooler surface. In these works Reusse is also tackling the notions of perception and remembrance, challenging what we consciously and subconsciously see.
Reusse has shown at Basel and had several high profile solo shows throughout Europe, the U.S. and in China. His work is held in numerous public collections including the Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museum Volpinium Wien, the Max Planck Institute in Münster, The Consul General in Paris, Deutsche Bank and private collections internationally.
