Andre’ Hemer Phenomena

1 October - 1 December 2023 Galleria SARP

SARP presents two exhibitions about the work of André Hemer, developed during the SARP Residency program 2022, firstly exhibited at Luis De Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles in 2022 and subsequently exhibited at SARP Gallery in Sicily in 2023.  This itinerant project explores the landscape of Sicily and intertwined with Hemer’s vast digital archives of landscapes in Vienna, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok and Sicily. An itinerant exhibition by André Hemer.

Hemer presents a new body of work conceived during his multiple encounters with the landscape of Sicily, Singapore, Los Angeles and Bangkok. He focuses on the sky brightness at dusk and the elusive light that can be detected when clouds filter sun rays. 
The exhibition features an immersive novel installation composed of a site-specific digital sculpture and two small drawings that were the back-bone material of his latest exhibition at Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles and developed in Sicily at Palazzo Previtera in 2022. This site-specific digital sculpture on display is inspired by various conceptual themes related to the composition of Venetian paintings of the eighteenth century  and incorporates many environmental phenomena such as dust storms, cloud formation and flora. The digital sculpture and the drawings feature the natural changing lights of Etna, the botanical verities  of the gardens of Palazzo Previtera digitally integrated with his vast digital archive of photographs and the scansion of various physical data across the globe. Combining architecture, technology, and digital art, the artwork emphasizes the evolution of the botanical garden of Palazzo Previtera as well as the changing climates of the Mediterranean of clouds of sands from the Sahara. Kalima is a term used to describe a meteorological phenomenon that occurs when fine sand and dust particles from the Sahara Desert are lifted into the atmosphere and transported by prevailing winds. 
Hemer's handling of light and colour through his juxtaposition  of digital images - that exploits generative adversarial network (GAN)  reveals both the beauty of blue sky and the anthropogenic environmental destruction through these poetical digital pigments that are carefully selected and then digitally manipulated from his extensive digital archive with shots across the globe. While the background blue sky of this digital sculpture allows tranquillity to the viewer, the interaction of images is dominated by the superimposing digital pigments that purposefully burst into a dynamic ecosystem of visual theoretical and practical messages spanning from Venetian frescoes to long-exposure photographs. The artificial intelligence systems used in the artistic post-production operate and measure themselves only with Hemer’s visual content since this data can be encoded into a language that the algorithm is able to translate into digital artworks. As a multi-media artist, he moves beyond the traditional way of experiencing and enjoying digital artworks displayed on the wall and place the digital sculpture in the center of SARP’s gallery by bringing the viewer closer to his subject matter. 
Hemer is interested into how the digital artwork interacts with the exhibiting space, where art, science and technology intertwine and communicate together. By placing the digital artwork in the center of the room, surrounded by an artificial basin of water and under a transparent wooden truss roof, he explores the perception and experience of space via various elements such as digital art (his artworks), technology (screen projector and digital artwork and the algorithm) and water (in the set-up of the show as references of the metaphor for reflection). In particular, water plays a dual role in this site-specific installation: 1) from a technical perspective clearly, it represents the reflective feature of his lenses into the artwork and 2) from a conceptual perspective, the water resembles the perpetuating effect of the water that evaporates form clouds and transform itself into the rain that comes from his blue sky and the effect of the vegetation that benefits from it. Water comes from the sky, water  is also responsible to the formation of clouds and the lack of water dehydrates the plants, make lands inhabitable and lifts up dust. At a cultural level, changes of climates refer to the water with the proverb “Red sky at night, shepherd's (or sailor's) delight”, the color blue concentrates in the area of the sky of light color, leaving traces of porpora color into the sky. This quote also recognizes that weather conditions are transferred from one place to the next by the strength of the winds. The depth of the sky is created through this movement of clouds that Hemer captures with his lenses and digitally manipulates them. With this work, Hemer aims to bring audiences closer to themes of visual aesthetics without overlooking the concept of sustainability in a discourse, that is not so much political but reflective of our pragmatic times.