A Journey Around Painters and Light

An installation specifically designed to travel inside a railcar of an old city tram on the occasion of the 2020 edition of LUMINALE Biennial for Light Art and Urban Design.

Instead of passengers, the 1956 vehicle operated by the historic Verkehrsgesellschaft Frankfurt (VGF) company transports the KARMACHINA multimedia installation across the neighbourhoods of Frankfurt; a “mobile installation” radiating out of the tram windows and visible from the streets, A Journey Around Painters and Light celebrates the diverse journeys into light such as those undertaken by many nineteenth- and twentieth-century painters in their artistic, personal, and collective research.

A Journey Around Painters and Light is a reflection on the physical and psychological import of light in Romanticism. From this paradigm of Romantic light, as opposed to the purely rational and illuminist light, the KARMACHINA installation embarks on a journey across the emotional, spiritual and perceptual landscapes of those painters and thinkers who have studied the nature of colour in the wake of J.W. Goethe’s Theory of Colours; painters like Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Josef Albers, and Victor Vasarely, each with their own understanding of light and colour. A Journey Around Painters and Light breaks down, reformulates, and sounds out each of these personal viewpoints, all so different but all sharing the same passionate drive.