52.2021

Traces of Time – A Phenomenology of Disappearance

Week by week, a strip of adhesive tape is arbitrarily applied to a surface of copper and lead. This seemingly insignificant gesture prevents oxidation precisely at the covered areas. It is a deferral of natural decay. After one year, the 52 strips are removed. What remains are traces: the negative imprint of an action that was both intentional and left to chance.

Yet these traces are unstable. Exposed once again to the atmosphere, they begin to fade. The previously protected areas oxidize, gradually merging with the surface, disappearing into it. The resulting image is not static—it is an image of time, or more precisely: an image intime. It becomes a site of tension between what is still visible and what has already become invisible.

What remains are fragments. Remnants of gestures whose origins have already receded into the past. The work becomes a diary—not a narrative chronicle, but a stratified deposit of time. The copper-lead surface functions as a storage medium—or a projection screen—for what we are still capable of remembering. It is a painterly phenomenology, in which the subjective and the objective collide, overlap, and ultimately reveals time itself—not as presence, but as the trace of its own disappearance.