What remains of an object when its familiar appearance is taken away?
A form appears.
I know what it is.
A vase.
And at that very moment, my certainty begins to waver.
Thermal imaging removes much of what I ordinarily rely on to recognize an object. Its surface disappears. Its material becomes difficult to determine. Color, in the familiar sense, is no longer there. Signs of use, glaze, reflections—all the things that distinguish this particular vase from another—recede.
And yet I still see a vase.
Why?
An opening is enough.
A curve.
A relationship between inside and outside.
Apparently, an object needs surprisingly little in order to be recognized.
But the longer I look at it, the less self-evident its name becomes.
The vase becomes a body.
The body becomes a form.
And the form could suddenly become something else.
Scale is lost. A curve can become a vessel, a body, or a landscape. A line becomes a horizon. An opening can suggest depth without telling me how deep it is.
The object begins to separate itself from its function.
That interests me.
Not because I want to conceal what is depicted. This is not about creating a puzzle.
What interests me is the point at which recognition still functions even though almost everything it normally depends on has disappeared.
How little does a thing need in order to keep its name?
And when does it lose it?
Something similar happens with the Bowl.
I know that I am looking at a bowl. At the same time, its form begins to slip away from my certainty. It has volume, an edge, an opening, yet it can no longer be clearly located in a particular space.
It could be small.
Or large.
It could be resting on a surface.
Or floating.
The image does not give me enough information to decide.
Meaning becomes fluid.
I begin to notice how much I myself add to the object.
I do not only see what is in front of me. I complete it. I compare. I recognize a form and give it a name.
Vase.
Bowl.
For a moment, the name settles the act of seeing.

Vase 2026, from „Leaving Shadows“  (thermograf.Aufn.)

Then it begins again.
What do I actually see before I know what it is?
A boundary.
A brightness.
An opening.
A concentration
A body in space.
Or simply a form on a surface?
Thermal imaging does not answer these questions.
That is precisely why it interests me.
It removes the object’s self-evidence without dissolving it completely.
It remains recognizable and at the same time becomes strange.
What remains, then, is not the memory of an object.
It is less.
And at the same time, more.
A form that still just barely carries a name.
And a gaze that, for a moment, can no longer be certain whether that name is enough

Bowl / Leaving Space 2026, from „Leaving Shadows“  (thermograf.Aufn.)