In the work of Anthony McCall and Éric Rondepierre film becomes material – the material of sculpturally ambitous installation, drawing or photography. Both artists achive a media-reflexive shift. Linearity and temporality connect these diffe^rent visual arts. Timelines addresses the temporal character of the filmic and photographic image as the medium of emerging and disappearing through still images and cinematic dissolves.

The film installations of Anthony McCall (*1946) are graphically motivated and are then carried out cinematically developing a plastic effect. The single frames of a roll of film continuously generate a form, which is projected into a fog-flooded room. The light is caught in the fog, creating an installation made of light, slowly altering, according to the development of the line in the film. In his influential work “Line Describing a Cone” (1973), which the Galerie Thomas Zander is showing on 17th March in the Neues Kunstforum, Anthony McCall makes the meaning of light and air his paradigmatic topic. Within thirty minutes a ring is generated, which re-enacts the beam of the projector as a three dimensional tunnel of light. “Doubling Back” (2003) and “You and I, Horizontal” (2005) further develop and elaborate this original film project. In the two installations, a room of light is created metaphorically by intersecting waves. The evolving lines and their interplay generate complex temporal spaces. Instead of a simple linearity of time, McCall’s lines brought into motion in the film, alludes to time’s interference and folds. In this way, his Timelines represent the coincidental as a dimension of temporal events. The Galerie Thomas Zander presents two light installations alternately and single frames, which document their graphic basis, and the early photographic work “Watertable” (1972), which deals with the formal and analytical construction of volume through lines, light, contrast and contour.

Éric Rondepierre’s (*1950) work translates moving images back into photography. He also emphasises the aspect of light and lines in cinematography to tackle the issue of volume construction and analytical separation. However, Rondepierre’s representations of representations above all bring the process of the film to a standstill. Single frames isolated from the film create leaps in time and irrational transitions.

Particulary in the cycles “Diptyka“ (1998-2000) and “Suites“ (1999-2001) Rondepierre develops the temporality of film through the example of the line. His Timelines evolve on the basis of the gaps between the images, the black borders of the single frames. Frames are a condition for the image and at the same time block out everything which is not inside its temporal and spatial limits. The passing landscapes seen in “Stance” (1996-98) and the frozen gestures of “Foule” (1999-2000) explicitly reveal the contingent moment of the image as an alienation.
A representative selection of Rondepierre’s photographic work from the last decade will be on view at the Galerie Thomas Zander.