Margus Kontus

The painting series is based on compositional positioning of magnetites in biological matter and the artistic abstraction of it as well as breaking the pattern with symmetrically positioned magnets (magnetic etching). By that I’m looking for ways to draw with magnetic force lines. The series is inspired by a magnetic poisoning I lived through and a resulting short-lived ability to sense the magnetic fields of the Earth. The same way the magnetic field remains unseen to the eye, part of the painting would also. Only a closer look reveals a force, that made paint escape the canvas.

The title “The dance of the magnetites” is referring to an idea of Alan Watts: “The picture of the world is a self-moving, self-generating, dancing patterns”. One can never be sure, what the next moment brings. Accepting the fluidity of life means going with it’s flow, because the pattern is in eternal change and brings unimaginable surprises with it. Be it a global pandemic or one individual’s ability to sense magnetic fields. The same way the magnetic etchings are dancing on the canvas, forming changing patterns, as might the biomagnetites in my brain have done, when I had the unexpected magnetic poisoning.

Apparatus
Magnetic amplifier, sphere, UV laser, photo-sensitive lacquer

What could be more natural than an object hanging straight over the surface. Yet that’s not happening here: exactly at the spot, where it should be hanging, there’s a magnetic amplifier, that pushes it away due to same pole magnetic fields. It leads to a dance of inevitability, expressed through a light spectacle and a temporary light drawing.
The exhibition visitor has the opportunity to push the UV laser to a move again and the whole process can start over again, resulting in another temporary drawing.

The whole sculpture is like a reminder, that everything is temporary. The past and the future are fiction and the only actual time exists now, until it’s gone. A drawing of light fades away the same. The Apparatus is an interactive sculpture in a cylinder shaped room, that draws chaotic abstract drawings depending on the way it’s started off.

Cylinder room
Plywood, wooden frame
300 X 240 cm

The Apparatus is built of cylinder magnets, that combine an amplified magnetic field. A cylinder room is in this case a metaphore for the unity of micro- and macrocosm. The positioning of the artworks refers to the Big Bang with the Apparatus in the center and the world it has created (the magnetpoisoning and the following). The paintings are “thrown” all over the walls and form patterns with each other.

In a way the wall of the cylinder room is a event horizon, a place where it’s impossible to return from, as the force of gravity has become so immense, that even light cannot escape it.