Feel smell sense Beauty
The danish-icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson creates fantastic and magical experiences with his installations. Time and time again he presents his audience to one genius installation after another. Eliasson’s studies of colors, lights, perception, embodiment combined with an interest in physical phenomenas such as light fraction in watermolecules and the reflective qualitites of light often results in an extraordinary perceptional and sensational experience
ARoS is currently exhibiting some of Eliassons amazing artworks, amongst those is the gigantic work Your Rainbow Panorama
Read about it here, below is a picture of the artwork Beauty
Like a lot of Eliasson’s installation Beauty is simple in its expression and at the same time incredibly intense. The participant enters the installation by passing through a dark room, that serves as a form of prepping room, before entering a larger room, with the walls and floors are lined with a pitch black clothlike material. The transition and movement from the dark preparation room to the dark room, where the artwork is installed includes a visual adjustment. As the participant enters the dark installation room the subtle smell of wet ground or dirt.
The lined floors resembles the feeling of walking around at home on carpets and adds to the participants experience when walking around in the installation room. The auditive effect of the lined walls and floors also takes away some of the noise that you usually can hear when visiting a museum or artgallery, you don’t hear the other participants steps and it is almost as if the clothlike material “eats” some of the sounds in the room. The installation room thereby has a quiet and delicate quality adding to the audiovisual experience. Your physical position in the room determines your ability to see the rainbow that will appear when standing in just the right angle and place in the room. As the lights hits the small waterdrops or rather watermolecules, the light rays fractures and reveals a beautifull rainbow, that gradually shifts in color-intensity and saturation as you move around the installation. The rainbow that reveals itself changes in size, form and position as the waterflow shifts in its intensity and force, this brings the artificial rainbow into constant motion, it moves and changes shape even when the participant stands still. The participants in the room are all similarly quiet, walks carefully around, almost whispering if saying anything at all. Their presence is merely noted and does not disturb the experience, but somehow it creates an intimate atmosphere between the participants that visits the exhibition at the same timespan.
The synergy created by the special combination of the participants kinaesthetic and audiovisual experience of the room brings forth the beauty of the installation. It is beautiful because you experience and sense the entirety of the artwork, you experience the reflections and thoughts behind the artwork, without the use of words or language, you understand the artwork through your body and your sensuous experience, from the starting point of the installation room in the museum to the moment where the fragile and delicate rainbow reveals itself before your eyes in that particular angle and at a that particular distance.
In this way the room holds special qualities, from the artwork’s simplicity and Eliasson’s unquestionable intention, he wants you to experience the phenomena a rainbow, emerges the beautiful and aesthetic experience.
