On the east façade, sunset to midnight
Inspired by J. M. W. Turner’s similarly named painting from 1843, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge, Paul Pfeiffer’s video work opens with a white-hot sun suspended mid-frame in a brilliant red sky with a band of dark blue waves scrolling down from the top of the frame to its bottom. To create his breathtaking projection loop, the artist filmed Cape Cod sunrises and sunsets and digitally fused them into a single image. While Turner dissolved the features of traditional landscape painting, such as the horizon line and single-point perspective, into a painterly mist in his vision of the sun, Pfeiffer complicates the location of the observer within the picture and investigates the nature of vision itself by flipping the relationship between sun and horizon line, making the sun stable and the horizon unstable.
Robert Barker Photography
As Pfeiffer noted in a 2002 artist statement about this video:
The viewer is torn between two contradictory realities coexisting on a single picture plane. There is the reality of the sun rising and setting behind the earth’s horizon and the opposing reality of the earth’s horizon moving across the surface of the sun. The resulting split sense of reality in the eye of the beholder is the real theme and subject of Morning After the Deluge.
It is precisely this instability of the onlooker’s position that resonates so strongly with our current moment, combining, in the words of one of my curatorial colleagues, “a sense of hopefulness and foreboding.”
Andrea Inselmann
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art