Ernst Caramelle "Ernst Caramelle"

‘Caramelle’s presentation at De Appel in November 1987 also integrated a dialectical mental structure into a spatial polarity. On entering the space the visitor was confronted with a wall painted red. In the centre a star-like form was left blank, a familiar form which Caramelle used earlier for his light stencils. Both the wall and the painted frame which accentuated the windows refer to the so-called ‘light-paintings’ that Caramelle created by exposing colored paper with stencils laid upon it to sunlight until it attained the required discoloration. Just as the ‘Ereignischarakter’ (event character) is crucial to these light pictures, Caramelle emphasised here the picture's transitoriness through his once-only painting of the wall. Reference is made not only to the duration of a work's creation and its eventual (temporary) presentation, but also to the specific space where it is exhibited. This dialectical principle was crystallised in the ping pong table set up in a narrow corridor, which referred to some of the questions he formulated earlier: sport as art, art as sport? (Kirsten Algera, ‘Art is sport for the few’, De Appel (1988) 2, pp. 15, 16.)