Berndnaut Smilde: Antipode, Ronchini Gallery

If there really is no such thing as witchcraft then explaining Berndnaut Smilde’s work is impossible. Famous for his Nimbus series, Smilde created a small, solitary cloud in a variety of indoor spaces using a mixture of smoke and very carefully controlled humidity conditions. The cloud would last just long enough to get a photograph of it before vanishing with – oh yes – a puff of smoke.

This was so wonderful and novel that it even got the Daily Mail’s attention. Whether this is an accolade or a cause for embarassment is another matter to be debated, but it shows the wide reaching fame of these works.  Smilde’s clouds have appeared in empty rooms, museums, and recently a gothic cathedral in Cologne, Germany, at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, as well as on the pages of Harper’s Bazaar next to Karl Lagerfeld, Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce, Alber Elbaz and Donatella Versace. They weren’t just art, they were one of TIME Magazine’s ‘Top Ten Inventions of 2012’.

With the Nimbus series Smilde created for himself an extremely tough act to follow, so what now? Well, his new show, Antipode,  at Ronchini Gallery continues in the same vein by bending the laws (or rather our perceptions) of nature. The show takes its name from a geographical term for parts of the earth that are diametrically opposed each other. We can expect more playing with contrasts: inside and outside, natural and man-made, reality and dream. 

Focusing this time on the magic and mystery of rainbows, Antipode projects light split through a prism onto a dark landscape inhabited by a Disney-esque castle. Smilde took this fairytale image from a card used by a device that made one of the first attempts to see in 3d, the Stereoscope.This fantastically Victorian contraption works by showing the left and right eye slightly different versions of the same image, tricking the natural focus of human binocular vision into creating the illusion of depth.

Rainbows are fantasy, but the electromagnetic spectrum and the stereoscope highlight how easily our eyes are tricked. Like Nimbus, we once again don’t quite know whether to believe what we are seeing.