Evi Keller

It was the long many long years of immersion in the wilderness that guided the German visual artist Evi Keller to the alchemy of Matière-Lumière [Matter-Light], the single title she has given to all her sculptural, pictorial, photographic and performative creations over the last 25 years. Works that embody a secret, intimate journey of creation and transformation of matter by light.

Driven and inhabited by light and the spirits of the wild, the artist creates with the four elements: fire, water, earth and air. Apart from medical needles, she uses traditional tools from the fields of painting, sculpture, engraving and silversmithing. Among other things, she combines pigments, minerals, plants, ash, ink and varnish on thin layers of recycled plastic film. She superimposes them, draws, paints, engraves, scratches, erases, sculpts, burns... exposing them to sunlight, rain and wind, or covering them with earth. The space-time, specific to each work, can span many months or years before its delivery.

The artist thereby transfigures the plastic material, fossilised light, into membrane, living skin that breathes the age of worlds, civilisations, stars. For the artist, these pieces of plastic film are an entombed sun, a memory of the fossilised light, “vestiges of creation” stemming from the cosmos.

In her exhibition at the Domain, Evi Keller presents recent works of an incandescent blue. “This blue is the blue of a cosmic glow, a luminescence, an incandescence. It is the blue gold of fiery suns in starry night-time skies, which connect us to the first seconds of the universe, where creation restarts at every moment.”