David Wlazlo

David Wlazlo (Victoria, Australia)

Overnight, 2023

oil, plywood

9 x 12 x 2.5 inches

In the early twentieth-century, art historian Heinrich Wölfflin pioneered the use of comparison: two images, presented side by side, revealed their differences and similarities. In the 1920s, film director Sergei Eisenstein explored the political potential of montage, the splicing together of two filmic images to create new and revolutionary meanings. In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin described the flash of an image when two different times, the past and the now, exploded together to form what he called a ‘constellation’ of meaning. Side by side, before and after each other, images and meanings exceed the sum of their parts when placed together. These painted images may or may not have been DVD covers from when I worked at a video rental store a long time ago. Perhaps I watched the films, or perhaps I just rearranged them back on the shelf. I can’t remember: it was a long time ago. But side by side, the interplay between works from different times and places allows two unknowns to meet, already interrelated but still yet to be watched.