Zürich, Wednesday, February 25. 2004
Pine Needles as Meaningful Patterns
The Swiss Foundation for Photography shows Lukas Felzmann’s photo project “Landfall”, a contemporary picture story.
Nadine Olonetzky
Streets in a flooded terrain, the earth lies fallow and in empty houses read and worn books pile up, exposed to time and weather. In the 15 year project “Landfall” the photographer and artist Lukas Felzmann focuses his gaze on nature, objects and signs: Furniture in an abandoned house, dust and dirt on a decomposing mattress, torn tapestries, piled up rocks which close off a doorway or the carvings on the surface of a school desk. Morbid? Melancholic? In a certain way yes, but Felzmann, born 1959 in Zürich, now living in San Francisco really has the “equilibrium between the ruins of civilization and the regenerative power of life” on his mind.
The landscape which is evoked through Felzmann’s pictures can not be categorized in a precise temporal or geographical way. Although most pictures are taken between the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Ocean in the West of the USA (some are from India), Felzmann strives to create a metaphorical landscape. Image upon image condenses in the viewer an imaginary landscape which tells of loss and errors, attempts and stops, and of the reclamations of nature.
The pictures don’t only tell about decay but just as much about new beginnings. As a wanderer, so it seems, Lukas Felzmann casually makes pictures. “ When photographing I work without an agenda only an urgency to make pictures.” He documents found scenes as well as making sculptural installations in the mode of Land Art. Stones are arranged into a circle, shards of glass into a square or five stacked chairs mimic a sculpture (or a poetic, surreal circus act).