Videowatercolors — 2000-2019
In the most recent series, Videowatercolors, Balth uses two or more moments from a digital video, which he, as it were, freezes in time. By combining these different ‘video grabs’ into 1 print, a new, often painterly image is created that connects space and time. Always separated by a horizontal or vertical line.
The images from the videos that Balth chooses often have the flowing effect of watercolor on paper. Hence the term ‘video watercolors’.
Light, movement and the passage of time are important elements in this series.
The videowatercolors engage in a poetic exploration of light and perception by studying the ever-shifting properties of light—its reflections, tints and colors, movements and rhythms.
“In 2015 I introduced a new type of light in my work, Night Lights.
It is not direct sunlight, filtered daylight or artificial light that now exposes the visible parts of reality — these are sources I examined in depth before — but ‘night light’ that results from lightning, a specific variant called ‘sheet lightning’, which strikes under certain atmospheric conditions on summer nights or at dusk and bounces off clouds and the heavens to create what looks like a diffuse backlighting effect. The electrical natural discharge, the unexpected light—these confront us all of a sudden with nature itself. At the same time, the digital video pixilation of the iPhone arrests the images somewhere between reality and abstraction, between a photo-technical state and a painterly atmosphere.” – Carel Balth
Beauty in Restraint
Balth explores the effects of the unceasing flow of the pixels of digital video captured on silk-barite or velvety watercolor paper. In more recent works, he works on canvas or harder surfaces, with the image sandwiched between an aluminum plate and a thin layer of epoxy that has been matte-polished to such perfection that it attains the sfumato softness of tufted paper.
Two or more images, ‘video-grabbed’ from visual reality yet altered in appearance through unexpected tilts and perspectives, combine to make a new whole that hovers between reality and abstraction. The resulting work, wondrously simple yet ingenuous, prompts aesthetic and ethical questions about the ways in which we see and understand the increasingly complex world around us.
“The question is how to formulate the complexity of our time without losing hope for the future.” Carel Balth, 2000