The Moment’s Translucence

From the rich abundance of the visible and the hidden emerge the poietic image worlds of Bernd Weingart. They open the threshold between reality and imagination, moving in light as in darkness, outshining the obvious and transforming fleeting moments into sensual presence.

With meditative composure and vivid curiosity, his art explores the dialogue of light and darkness while simultaneously revealing the subtle nuances of human existence. His photographs are moments of contemplative depth - figures of the visible, imbued with the intimation of hidden realities. This awareness permeates all of his works with a quiet melancholy, reminding us that we are »not very reliably at home in the interpreted world« and that a part of our being dwells beyond time.

The transparency of light touching the things around us condenses into the erotic intensity of the instant. Photography fixes this moment of reflection and transforms it into a graphic trace. The camera obscura, known since antiquity, became a precise instrument of exploring the world - an epitome of documentary exactitude. Yet this very exact moment of photography remains secondary - merely mimetic, without existential substance. Bernd Weingart’s art withdraws from such mimesis up to the point where he succeeds in allowing the trouvailles of his images to become transparent, giving form to the experienced moment of what is, for him, the transcendent.

Where modernity reduces meaning and demands reduction, his pictorial invention eludes the pressure of enforced interpretation and opens a field of ambiguity. Between stillness and motion, between silence and structural dynamism, a luminous expanse unfolds in which his gaze begins to breathe.

The individually chosen fragment of the world simultaneously illuminates the photographer’s personal background and the conditions of his seeing. It is a mode of seeing that recalls the river described by Heraclitus: nothing remains, and yet within change a hidden measure reveals itself. The Daoist understanding of nature in Zhuangzi, where things are left to themselves in order to appear in harmony, also resonates in the quiet rhythms of his photographs. Heidegger’s »The Pathway« becomes perceptible when Weingart’s gaze charges the everyday and reveals the inexhaustible within the ordinary. In the depth dimension of his images one may also sense the ancient thought of the correspondence of Hermes Trismegistus, which binds the singular to the whole.

Bernd Weingart’s images speak of the freedom to turn ourselves toward the world - with the promise of being touched by that transparency of the moment which is part of our very being, quiet and ineffable, dwelling beyond time.