Ludwig Wilding

Witness of the epochal transition from the industrial society to the information one, Ludwig Wilding [Grünstadt, 1927 – Buchholz in der Nordheide, 2010] started producing his Programmierte Strukturbilder at the beginning of the sixties, thus developing a logical-sensorial art based on virtual motion. Ambiguity, indefiniteness and instability were the distinctive characteristics of the researches of that instant of the century; artists as Ludwig Wilding particularly went deep into the debate about apparent movement and stereoscopic vision (made possible by our binocular system which registers two different images and combine them into one, producing the experience of a third dimension).

In this way Wilding's works should be considered as a natural evolution of the traditional relationship between background and foreground. Binocular vision allows, in fact, to achieve the sense of depth thanks to the union of the different images generated in our right and left eyes. During the sixties Wilding managed to develop interference in the form of lines overlapping in the space. The lines were organized in two levels, separate but complementary: the fore part of the work and its background, which end up combined together in the retina. Practically the perceptive synthesis of the frontal level and of the one behind could generate an apparent movement.

Despite the fact that “seeing is knowledge” sometimes senses can deceive us, stimulating illusions or even hallucinations. Wilding's granular elaborations specifically act on optical illusion, proving the fact that art is a wonderful trick. The perceptive oscillation of these works is created by interspaced lines, orthogonal weaves, concave/convex surfaces, transparencies and retreats that analyse the inter-dependence between the artist/researcher and the spectator/receiver, as well as that between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. Because of this relationship, the work does not exist until it's seen; vice verse it stops existing when no more directly perceived.

Moreover it is necessary to have a direct experience of these works because the only way to really appreciate them is alive. It is impossible to understand the immediate passage from a “still form” to a “moving form”, which is the moment when the work of art assume a life of its own, activated by the spectator and induced to mutation by the variation of his own vision.

Considering that kinetic-visual investigations can be divided into two different categories, those concerning deduction and those recurring to induction, the structural gradients of Ludwig Wilding, without doubts, belong to the second case: they are intellectual provocations that act on our retina's photo-receptors.

Art exhibition  at Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art