CAMERA OBSCURA – DRAWING - Artist project with Lars Herrmann

The series “Desastres” by Jürgen Lechner (Camera Obscura) and Lars Herrmann (Sphäroscriptographie)

Both recently created “Desastres” mark the prelude to a longer series of Sphäroscriptographie by the Franconian artists Jürgen Lechner and Lars Herrmann.

They emanate from the prolonged and ongoing collaboration of the artists concerning Jewish cemeteries in Franconia.

Lechner’s pinhole camera photography of playgrounds forms the basis of these Desastres. A muted horror flows from these grounds persistent in their lonely, melancholy poetry.

The foggy, silent and abandoned playgrounds pierce the sky – all void of children.

This lovecraftian horror captivates the painter Lars Herrmann who combines this grim loneliness with the brutal etchings of the desastres of war by Goya.

Goya’s desastres occur mostly in an unshaped and grey world – yet in the foreground the unbridled animality of war dominates in all respects. Herrmann uses individual motifs

and draws them into the photos. He simultaneously ensures that the playgrounds adopt an aged and weathered look.

The worlds of photography, art history and sketching converge in the works of Lechner and Hermann. Together they demonstrate the old, weathered face of our times,

in which nameless terror and the bloody horrors of human history reveal themselves.

Lechner takes his images on a Robert Rigby 4×5” and a Zero 4×5” large format pinhole camera on sheet film Kodak T-Max 100, 4×5”.

The bleak, mystical ambiance of the desastres series requires rare and optimum misty mood scenes.

Hermann’s preferred technique is shading in the style of the old masters attained with a black pen.

This unusual drawing device is used in combination with gouaches, drawing ink and coloured pen cartridges.