Right where sky and earth meet, where the hours of the day emerge in a variety of colours and dissolve into darkness as time progresses, there lies the horizon. A borderline whose perception – both ideally and in terms of perspective – can vary depending on the viewer's location. According to the cliché, its sight is atmospherically and romantically charged, especially at sunrise and sunset. A phenomenon that Caspar David Friedrich already tried to capture in some of his paintings. The longing gaze into the distance momentarily suggests that anything is possible. It allows the viewer to temporarily escape from the (sobering) reality and to dream. In Afterglow, Maria Moritz deliberately breaks with this perception of this spectacle of nature. Her site-specific mural, made with airbrush and acrylic spray paint, captures the so-called "blue hour", but it directs the gaze from the outside to the inside, from the distance back into the exhibition space. Through the iridescent hues that fade into the darkness of the wall, Moritz suggests a flow of time that appears to have stopped. In this way, she freezes the seemingly eternal daydream and its potential to lose oneself in it extinguishes. What now? Where do the thoughts go that don't want to stay in reality, but also can't lose their way along the horizon? The slowly dawning awareness of the complex of image, depiction and context may at first feel like a reality bump, but on the other hand it enables a better understanding of the painterly strategies of seduction used by Moritz. Coquetting with the sublime, the horizon line, through its reduced and abstracted translation, disrupts the emerging illusionistic space and consciously plays with the rising (dis)illusion, in order to surrender to the moment all over again.

Text: Vivien Kämpf