Stephan Reusse    Cologne, July 2025

The Empty Space

Perhaps every work begins there.
Not with an idea.
Not with an image.
But with a place where something is missing.
A painting is taken down from the wall.
The wall remains.
I look at it.
At first, I see nothing. I know this state. The eye searches for something to hold on to and finds only an empty surface.
Only thermal imaging changes something.
A slight difference appears on the wall. Barely more than a suggestion. It is not drawn, not painted, not photographed. It is simply there.
For a short time.
Then it disappears as well.
For a long time, I would have said that thermal imaging makes visible what remains hidden from the eye. Today, that sentence is no longer enough for me. What interests me about this wall is less what becomes visible than the experience that something can be absent and still remain present.
The wall is empty, but it is not without a history.
Something was there.
I do not need to know what it was. The trace tells me nothing about the image that once hung in that place. It describes neither its colors nor its form. It gives me no information that would allow me to reconstruct it.
And yet it changes the place.
As I look at these images, a name comes to mind.
Rothko.
I am surprised by it.
Not because the images resemble Rothko. Nor because I was consciously looking for an art-historical connection. The name is simply there. And with it come other images, other spaces, other experiences of seeing.
At that moment, I realize that the empty wall is not only triggering something in front of me. It touches something that has long been present within me.
That changes the work.
The thermal image still shows a difference in temperature. But that is no longer what matters. What matters is what this barely visible difference sets in motion.
An image that is no longer there calls up other images.
The emptiness begins to fill without anything being added.
Since then, I have also come to see the wall differently.
It is not empty.
It is quiet.
For me, there is a difference.
Emptiness describes an absence.
Silence leaves something open.
The wall does not wait. It does not preserve anything for me. The warmth will disappear whether I perceive it or not.
But for a brief moment, an opening appears.

Rothk.0  #13.4, (thermogr. Image), 2023

It is precisley this moment that fascinates me.
Not the explanation of what had been there.
Not the reconstruction of a lost image.
But the experience that absence can change a place.
I return to this wall again and again.
To the moment after.
To a surface from which something has been removed and which, precisely because of that, acquires a presence of its own.
For a long time, I had no word for it.
Today, I sometimes think of the word trace.
Not as a concept.
More as something that remains without intending to remain.
And perhaps a work really does begin there:
in a place that is not empty,
but open.

S.R. 2025