We, humans
by Trine Ross
We, humans, have a special connection to clouds. We are fascinated by them and cannot help attempting to decode them, either to forecast the weather or just for the fun of it. We seem to recognize everything from faces to rearing horses reflected in these formations in the sky. But certain clouds signify something different than a mere approaching rainstorm or a vivid imagination. Those are the kind of clouds that are shaped by destruction, the kind that are pulled upwards and bloom like a mushroom after a nuclear detonation, or furiously rise over an erupting volcano and become terrifying epitomes of nature’s immense powers.
Encountering such destructive clouds can quiet clearly leave us horror-struck. But gazing at them from a distance or seeing them in photographic reproductions allows a small crack to appear in our feelings of terror and a hint of fascination to seep into the mix. And precisely then is when we have arrived at what is known as the sublime. In our daily lives we put a lot of effort into taming the powers of nature and stowing away our own potential for mass destruction. But standing in front of Juan Hein’s pieces, all that silenced potency is reactivated. The cloud formations are signifiers of situations that either frighten or disgust us, while we—almost against our own will—are attracted to those exact scenarios that are threatening our very existence. This is the essence of the sublime experience: horrific and fascinating, paralyzing yet vitalizing, universal and entirely private.
Our relationship to photography is just as ambivalent and still dominated by the deeply ingrained idea that a true reality is captured, in spite of countless examples of that reality being an altered or constructed one. Strangely enough black and white photography often feels even more believable and authentic than its color counterpart -perhaps because of the sense that such images belong to a far away and remote past. Even if we rationally very well know that photographic images have been staged and manipulated for as long as it has been possible to create them.
Hein is showing us that now we can even capture and create photographic images without the use of a camera. Instead of seeking out clouds in the sky, he mines the digital cloud, where all our photos and information are stored, and re-photographs the images that he finds most interesting. These photographs are anonymous, without a known mastermind, either because the photographer did not take credit or because there is really no creator, as it is the case for all sorts of surveillance imagery and automatic captures that no human eye consciously vets and chooses.
And this is where Juan Hein steps in: He chooses the motif, he enlarges it, crops it and digitally manipulates it. This process stretches the final image into something in between an almost classical etching, with strong sculptural aspects, and a deliberately pixelated digital meta-reality. By doing this, Hein points to the very origin of the picture -historically, technically, conceptually- while the pixels melt into images thus reminding us of the myriad of water droplets that gather into those cloud formations that we ponder in the sky.
And what do we actually see? Bombings, natural disasters or the silhouette of a rearing horse? Documented truth, aesthetic choices or pure fiction? Hopefully any answer will always remain in flux, just as fluid and transient as the clouds themselves. Indeed, therein lies the intrigue and the mastermind. ~
Art Historian and Art Critic. Epilogue text in the book ‘Clouds and bombs’.