7. Holography

The holographic material that I use in my paintings produces lines that change place and color according to the viewers’ angle of vision.. I not only use it to experiment with new ”contemporary” materials, but also because it suits the evasive character of the labyrinth that we come across without recognizing it in life. We must allow the effect of the holographic film to play on us. Behind a first and somewhat cold and glitzy appearance, one discovers a third dimension of light, which can become hypnotic or staggering, through which the motive fades as if within its aura. This dimension logically matches the hidden fourth dimension of the labyrinth.

Holography became important not only in optics but also in cosmology. “Strange discovery! The horizon of a black hole would look like a hologram, like those images that one believes three dimensional, but which are only the reflections of a two dimensional object, everything that happens inside is inscribed in the envelope. This result has later been considered as so fundamental that Gerard’t Hooft at the University of Utrecht in 1993 and Leonard Susskind at the university of Stanford in 1995 decided to make of it a principle “The Holographic Principle”. It postulates that the complete description of all physical systems occupying a region of space can be given by a theory defined only on the frontier of this region…. it is then tempting to stretch out this result to our own world, to do as if our world was only a hologram”¹.

Is there not a parallel here with the maze, which contains the image of an invisible whole or “One”, similar to a black hole of which it constitutes the horizon? It is said that the contemplation must be practiced in ignorance. If painting is also that sort of practice, the use of holography becomes like a metaphor for all we ignore as we paint. In fact, the painter does not really know what he paints.