| 3 février 13h52 - 2016 Silo Temporaire, 2016 |
| Intervention in the public space: shadow painted on an industrial silo, reproducing the shadow of a blast furnace projected on a winter day. Produced within the framework of the artists' residency Public Art Experience, Fonds Belval, Luxembourg Curator: Stéphanie Delcroix, Michael Pinsky Collection: Fonds Belval, Luxembourg "Instead of producing steel, blast furnaces produce forms, narratives, a landscape, a temporal and spatial reference. It is no longer the slag that passes from the blast furnace to the temporary silo, but it is the shadow of one that is projected onto the other according to the vagaries of time. The painted shadow is a document and a fiction." Attentive to everything that allows us to take the measure of time, Jan Kopp multiplies his works - drawings, sculptures, installations, animated films, etc. - which can be read as calendars. - which can be read like so many calendars. In Belval, the artist has "frozen" the interplay of shadows and sunlight in order to inscribe the presence of the blast furnaces on the immaculate white facade of the former milk silo. The challenge was to materialize, in the form of a painting, an ephemeral and random motif that appears, as it is, only twice a year: "On the other 363 days, there is a kind of distortion in relation to the fixed contours: on the one hand, we see the contours of a stopped time - February 3 at 1:52 p.m., to be precise - and on top of that, the elusive drawing of the moment passes. "What interests Jan Kopp in this game of cast shadows is the tension born of a double superposition: past/present, present/future. Viewed through the magnifying glass of the present - let's say July 2, during the Blast Furnace Festival - the motif inscribed on the building's façade can be interpreted both as a memory of February 3 and as a foretaste of a perfectly symmetrical day, November 7. "This temporal dialogue seems to me relevant to the initial role of the Silo - a temporary warehouse that will be emptied little by little before filling up again, like an hourglass - but also, more generally, to the Belval site, which is in the process of forging a future for itself, but draws its identity from its past." |
| — Excerp from the magazine Le périodique du Fonds Belval, n°2, 2016 |
| Interview: Jan Kopp talks about the installation in the film Regards d'artistes sur Belval, directed by Catherine Richard on a commission from the Fonds Belval, 2016. |
| Interview: Jan Kopp talks about the installation in the film Regards d'artistes sur Belval, directed by Catherine Richard on a commission from the Fonds Belval, 2016. |
Installation views: painted shadow on an industrial silo