When Albrecht Dürer produced a woodcarving of a rhinoceros five hundred years ago he could never have imagined that it would be cause for the lively debate about the odds at which fact and fiction are now related. Dürer relied exclusively on a handful of written descriptions and one sketch by an unknown artist to produce this print. At that time no one doubted the apparent accuracy with which Dürer depicted this exotic species.
In the following century this quasi-documentary image became increasingly popular and would eventually have quite an impact within the arts. Subsequently, this early example of a seemingly realistic representation that is in fact resignedly based on speculation became a lasting part of our visual memory.
Visual artist Daan Paans explores these blind spots in our visual historiography: with the inquisitive mind of a scientist, he aims to undo the distorting mechanisms of image making. He does this by producing ‘counter-images’ in response to images from the past, present and future with which he implicitly discloses the contradictory nature in which the original images present themselves.
For the work Rhinoceros, Paans photographed hypothetical archetypes from the natural, scientific, and science-fiction world. One by one Paans meticulously modelled each of these photographs from the striking representations that had coloured our perception at the time (in the past), that nowadays colour our perception (in the present), and will soon colour our perception (in the future).
The three case studies in this exhibition represent each of these timeframes and include the following topics respectively: a pristine rainforest with fauna from a bygone age (modelled after a 19th century engraving showing the earth before mankind), the resurrection of aurochs in contemporary times (referring to the extinct aurochs depicted in the cave paintings of Lascaux) and a 3D study of the form of a meteorite as an artefact (derived from visions of the future in science fiction films).
Through these complex, layered links between perception, time, fiction and science, Paans’ photographs dizzily dance circles around one another.