Claudia Comte

Dark Suns, Bright Waves

Claudia Comte deploys a visual language that comes out of her research into natural and digital forms, and her works are the culmination of intense study and design. The fourth in a series of interventions, Dark Suns, Bright Waves, is Comte’s boldest wall painting to date, a set of self-supporting walls in dialogue with the surrounding environment.

Dark Suns, Bright Waves is a highly complex and mimetic work featuring a black-and-white image of a concentric circle that creates waves, redolent of forms existing in nature: 10 modules of the same size are mounted on an imaginary vanishing line to create a perspective effect on location in AlUla. Each wall features part of a pattern extracted from a diagram the artist refers to as flower or sun. The pattern is the result of research on the geological and natural shapes that recur in this location and is also inspired by the studies of German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology in 1866.

Each form develops through proximity, proliferating in the next image as if generated by the preceding one, the outcome of an expansion that mimics the movement of dunes shaped by the wind, the geological transformations of the earth and the way the sun heats the ground. It is as if the world of plants, minerals, and animal life is transformed into algorithmic sign, as if at last digital representation and ecosystem come together in the prehistoric trace of a fossil, a rock, a shell, a primordial imprint of living presence. Combining organic forms with optical patterns and life with digital information, this vibrant installation alludes to the world’s primitive metamorphosis as a spectacular presence against a scenic natural landscape backdrop of extreme beauty.

Claudia Comte (b. 1983, Switzerland, based in Basel) has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions, most recently Tree Line Curve, Rolex Learning Center, Lausanne (2021-2022); The Dreamers, 58th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale 2021; After Nature, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid (2022); Jungle and Corals, Konig Galerie, Berlin (2021); and The Sea of Darkness, Kunstraum Dornbirn (2021), and Desert X 2017, California.

Dark Suns, Bright Waves
26.651056, 37.992889
AlUla, Saudi Arabia
Desert X AlUla 2022