Like a pool of water reflecting the sky, placed at the castle of Ehrenbreitstein, creates a flux of images incorporating the walls and building. Creating a heightened experience of its surroundings, it involves the beholder in a game of perception, intriguing to find the «right» view of the motif. Ever since French landscape painters like Claude Lorrain and Niclas Poussin defined their ideal of the landscape in the mid 17th century, gardeners and architects had the task of creating the Real World inspired by these framed images – something that today almost appears as an inverted reality.
In the early 19th century the painters of the romantic period utilized a convex dark mirror in order to paint the landscape as these masters did.
Looking at the landscape through the mirror created a framing, a muted colour-range and a special curvature of the motif. This was also the era of the Rheinromantik leading the first travelers to the Rhine-valley around Koblenz to admire the castles and the scenery framed through a pocket size Claude-Glass. Certain apertures of landscape are cut out and saved in the consciousness of the viewer.
The development of the camera, and ever more so, the instant reproduction through the digital camera change our experience and the way we look at the surrounding landscape.
Client: Garden Show Ehrenbreitstein, Koblenz
Construction: 2011
Photographer: Hans Joosten
Plan/Section Image: TOPOTEK 1
