Light enters through what appears to be a shuttered opening and falls across a wall in a sequence of elongated, attenuated bars: cool silver, geometrically precise, each shadow between them as defined as the light itself. The effect is architectural: the light imposes a temporary structure onto the room, a grid that exists for as long as the sun holds its angle and then disappears. John Stathatos composes his frame so that the door and wall become a stage for this transient geometry.
Light enters through what appears to be a shuttered opening and falls across a wall in a sequence of elongated, attenuated bars: cool silver, geometrically precise, each shadow between them as defined as the light itself. The effect is architectural: the light imposes a temporary structure onto the room, a grid that exists for as long as the sun holds its angle and then disappears. John Stathatos composes his frame so that the door and wall become a stage for this transient geometry.
The Lumen series (2004) draws on the Pythagorean belief, recorded by Aristotle in On the Soul, that particles visible in a shaft of light represent the soul: “in perpetual movement, even in a dead calm.” Stathatos treats the geometric bars in Lumen VII not as compositional material but as a substance carrying metaphysical presence into the spaces it temporarily occupies. The compositional instinct has a precedent in the work of André Kertész, who used windows and the shadows they cast to transform domestic spaces into fleeting geometric compositions; but where Kertész pursued the formal poetry of the transient, Stathatos loads that geometry with the weight of an ancient proposition about light and the soul.
The bars of light have a near-calligraphic quality: measured, spaced, deliberate-seeming, as though the light were writing something across the surface of the wall. The sense that the pattern is legible rather than accidental: a sign rather than an effect, gives the Lumen series its contemplative character. The room is empty, the light is transient, and something is being inscribed. The photograph holds the moment of inscription before it dissolves.
