Galerie Privée 2026 - Lumière du Sud

Like a cutout, the monument projects into the sky — set against the blue that photography renders as a grey value. A midday in the south so sharply tests the limits of our vision, so closely does the image approach the architectural sculpture of antiquity: the sculptor who, two and a half thousand years ago, chiselled his leaves and buds from stone was, like the photographic artist, a connoisseur of light. For without the sun playing every notch and every ridge in chiaroscuro, his relief would remain soft at the capital and the column would lose its roundness.

Dazzled by façades, we seek the shade, until a tree trunk divides the city beneath us diagonally into two fields: a dark band without beginning or end, as though there were no ground. Looking seems akin to flying. It gets along without a fixed position and without a tripod — even where the bright day models the face of a woman. Carefully the dark-haired woman lowers her head into the pool, gazing away from us and upward. Does the image seem silent because her ears are already underwater? Or because we know that the delicate veins of light rippling across her neck are a purely visual event? There is a stillness in the images of Christian Scholz that is bound up with the intensity of seeing. The photographic artist's gaze at every curve in the branches is directed equally at the emptiness — a bright nothingness that only that shrub, in that place, at that hour, naturally and boldly encircled.

It is already late afternoon, and on Rome's cobbled Piazza del Popolo solitary figures too stand in the pull of a now benevolent light. Long shadows double the filigree outlines of tourists, local residents and homeward-bound passers-by, lending them all the same direction. Measured by the position of the sun, no one can withdraw from the community. The light to which Scholz devotes his work so uncompromisingly, so analogously and with a "furious patience" — comes and goes as a quiet, continuous measure of time, equally attuned to everything and everyone amid all that changes.

Isabel Zürcher, March 2026

Exhibition catalogue (DE/FR): 26_Broschüre_Scholz_web.pdf