It is autumn. Leaves collect in the puddles on the footpaths. In the mist of dusk, houses are transformed into creatures with glowing, dark yellow compound eyes. The colours of the lights shimmer, dimly or harshly, on the wet asphalt of the streets and squares. Bernd Weingart at large in Berlin.
The night had always attracted him, even back in the days when he discovered the world of the Whispering Gallery on his airy flights through the landscape of Thuringia. And now he was able to interpret it again in a quite different way, that atmosphere he had ever since so passionately sought to translate in his images. He found it now, reflected in the dark that stared back at him from the puddles in which fallen leaves eddied in seemingly infinite deceleration, moved by strange attractors in cosmic space. Between, yawning endlessness: the withering of things. Visible in a light of antique gold, a colour reminiscent of the light of the oldest galaxies in our universe, a light that spills across things sometimes from the gaze of the viewer. At other times it shines through the withering of the same observer as through a veil. And although Bernd Weingart cannot make out where the light came from or where it might go, he calls it - following the movement in his images - The Light in the Depths.
A veiled, melancholic warmth he experiences there, but it is also and always an enchanting comfort to him, an «enchantment saturated with sorrow». On its scent, I may even have found the entrance to my own Underworld, he says, standing in the Weinbergspark in Berlin Mitte, pointing at a channel worn by rain in the sand. He has listened to it, he says, so many nights, as the lamplight flowed along it, fine-grained, silent and without meaning. Down into the Duat-blue dream realit , that place where one’s own existence no longer conceals the darkness at its root, where beauty is the very thing that gives birth to the melancholic form of sadness.
- Christian Weingart