Cognitive Research Traveller
Rüdiger Andorfer, former director of the Arnulf Rainer Museum Baden
Driven by philosophy and science, Udo Fon is an artistic researcher who consistently pursues the primal theme of the arts: the function of human consciousness at the boundaries of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. Fon refers to these concepts coined by Lacan and his work has developed an artistic system for expanding our perception along this logic from the very beginning. Even in his early, expressive paintings of the 1990s, Fon sets out in search of this conditio humana and poses the central question of where from and where to? However, Fon does not work like a painter who intuitively creates a picture following an urge or an excitement, or a sculptor who works with material on volumes and wrests forms from it. Instead, he realises meticulously planned projects and groups of works that always convey knowledge on several levels and with nuanced contrasts.
Fon takes the quantity of available results of basic scientific research, which are only marginally received on a broader social basis, and their reflection dominated by traditional images and established conventions, as the starting point for series such as ‘Artificial Star Field Analysis‘ , or the ‘Imagination of Unknown Universal Networks‘. However, his works are not only mediators between the fields of art and science, but function much more like sociological experiments that undermine the economy of attention in an image-driven society. With ‘Imagine Unlimited Universal Credit’ Fon treats a well-known set piece of reality not only in the sense of the ‘Ready Made’ and its criticism of the artwork as a pure object of representation, but also addresses questions immanent to the economy and the art market with a subtle amount of humour.
As a consistent further development of his artistic research work, Fon has been developing the large-scale project ‘Die Große Resonanz‘. A simple, natural sound – an acoustic (sine) wave as first visualised by the physicist Ernst Chladni (1756-1827) – is reflected (echo), doubled (louder) and deflected (out of tune). We are constantly exposed to this process, which we can locate and recognise as long as we have good hearing. Translated into the languages of science and digital representation, the original statement is increasingly encoded. Fragmented, predictable and aesthetically presented. The simple sound becomes a great metaphor for the infinite complexity of everyday life and the driving energies of life.