The Gold Projections
August 2–31, 2019
Screenings: Fridays and Saturdays from sunset through 1am.
This August, the Pierre Boulez Saal will be home to The Gold Projections, a monumental installation by American artist Joe Ramirez. During the summer between performance seasons, Berlin’s new concert hall becomes a space of pure visionary silence.
Inspired and working with the architect Frank Gehry’s initial sketch for the Pierre Boulez Saal, Ramirez’s current design for The Gold Projections consists of two massive golden disks, facing each other across the elliptical room.
“The intensity of the projected light reflects and fluctuates between opacity and translucency, almost reaching a point of dissolution. A golden disk shimmers in a dark room, a circular support, slightly convex like a camera lens, a solar surface of 22 carat gold encapsulates the ‘miraculous metaphysical’ evocation of light and then, this luminosity shifts into its opposite light pole, just as bright but now a nocturnal light, a lunar surface. The golden ‘solar screen’ eclipsed by a silver moon where tricks of the eye occur and uncanny associations come to mind.”
–Louis Benassi, London
Born in San Francisco in 1958 and based in Berlin since 2007, Joe Ramirez studied painting and film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. During the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, he had the Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings up close, an experience that inspired the development of The Gold Projections. It was at this time, Ramirez mastered a painterly control of light and surface while evoking other conceptual issues surrounding the gaze, the ethereal and the material. Looking at a Gold Projection is tantamount to experiencing a solitary viewing of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Within the hand-tooled surfaces, painting and cinema fuse into the language of dreams, a surrealist “spectrology” of hyper paint—pigments (by a painter) of light.
“The Gold Projections are the trails into a sublime landscape of dreams… I’m interested in going further into this poetic enigma. This space by Frank Gehry is still alive in darkness and silence. If a room could breathe, this is the room. The installation is about ‘breathing light.’”
–Joe Ramirez
Starting from the elemental materials of Western painting and moving into a dialogue with such influences as Andy Warhol’s “Screen Tests,” James Turrell’s chromatic use of light and space; Ramirez’s work advances towards the integration of a “Blakean composite art” creating a captivating link between paint and the poetic, moving image. The Gold Projections live within a knife-edge of coexistence between these two media.
“Ramirez’s use of the relationship of light as material, and material as light grounds his projections within a highly personal and original aesthetic that is best described as an expanded alchemical imagination.”
–Mark Gisbourne
“All I know is: there’s nothing like it.”
–Wim Wenders
The Pierre Boulez Saal was founded by pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and opened in March 2017 in Berlin. Designed by Frank Gehry, it is part of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, a conservatory for music students primarily from the Middle East and Northern Africa, and presents a program of more than 150 performances each season.
Presented by the Pierre Boulez Saal in cooperation with WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
The Gold Projections premiered in 2017 with a special presentation at Kulturforum on the occasion of the 67th Berlin Film Festival.
Admission
Limit of 200 visitors at any given time
Screening dates
August 2/3; 9/10; 16/17; 23/24; 30/31
For press and media inquiries please contact
Clara Tang, tang.artpress [at] utweingarten.de
ARTPRESS – Ute Weingarten / +49 30 48 49 63 50
www.artpress-uteweingarten.de/en/press
