The humanist, architect and art theorist Leon Battista Alberti suggested in 1435 that art should henceforth be placed in an eternal dichotomy between unattainable self-love, deception and self-awareness. For him, the reflection of the self lies at the beginning of all art. If he was right, then this self-awareness would have been rather opaque in the beginning. The history of the mirror is a continuous illumination of reflection, from obsidian, to glass over silver, to razor-thin aluminum alloys. The objects of Esther Mathis intervene in this logic, reversing it. The Age of Enlightenment as a European movement was closely linked to the development of lenses, the microscope and binoculars. Have we seen the world more clearly since then? Mathis questions this.  The opaque is here only an apparently paradoxical movement; the darkening, "clouding", serves Mathis as a guide to the lucid.

Damian Christinger, independent curator and writer

The humanist, architect and art theorist Leon Battista Alberti suggested in 1435 that art should henceforth be placed in an eternal dichotomy between unattainable self-love, deception and self-awareness. For him, the reflection of the self lies at the beginning of all art. If he was right, then this self-awareness would have been rather opaque in the beginning. The history of the mirror is a continuous illumination of reflection, from obsidian, to glass over silver, to razor-thin aluminum alloys. The objects of Esther Mathis intervene in this logic, reversing it. The Age of Enlightenment as a European movement was closely linked to the development of lenses, the microscope and binoculars. Have we seen the world more clearly since then? Mathis questions this.  The opaque is here only an apparently paradoxical movement; the darkening, "clouding", serves Mathis as a guide to the lucid.

Damian Christinger, independent curator and writer