On the Verge of Visibility

The visual phenomena of light when day meets night, sky meets earth and threshold moments associated with borders, captured by Wolfgang Tillmans, on view in Porto.

Wolfgang Tillmans, <i>La Palma</i>, 2014. Courtesy: Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York

For his first exhibition in Portugal, Wolfgang Tillmans (1968, Remscheid, Germany) continues to expand the possibilities for the reception of his oeuvre through a radical repositioning of its multiple dimensions.

At Serralves, he pays particular attention to what he describes as his Vertical Landscapes, and the visual phenomena of light when day meets night, sky meets earth, cloud meets sky and threshold moments associated with borders, between different states of matter and their distribution, concretely within the area of the image, and politically in the world of people and goods. Dating from 1995 until the present, and printed in scales ranging from the standard size of photographic printing paper, to the panoramic expanse of four metres, these vertical landscapes encapsulate the expressive potential of Tillman’s highly developed visual formalism, and his engagement with photography as inherently physical as it is immaterial. In their unnerving beauty, produced partially by the camera makers technical advances and partly by the photographer's insistence on allowing those advances to show, they create a challenge to the canon of visual cool preeminent in today’s visual culture.

**Top**: Wolfgang Tillmans, *La Palma*, 2014. Courtesy: Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, Maureen Paley, London, David Zwirner, New York. **Above**: "Wolfgang Tillmans. On the Verge of Visibility". View of the exhibition at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto

At Serralves he has conceived the exhibition in relation to the architecture of the Museum galleries, which he has subjected to subtle structural intervention. His installation of pictures and video takes into account their spatial distribution not only on and between walls but also in relation to the distribution of different volumes and fluctuating luminosity. The chronological scope of the exhibition encompasses Tillmans’ photocopied photographs made in the late 1980s through to a number of iconic works from the 1990s and recent photographs taken with a digital camera in the 2000s and 2010s. None of the photographs have been digitally retouched. They range from the standard print size to the scale of history painting. While people and society are largely absent from the works presented in the exhibition, a reflection on the possibilities and the limits of who and what can be recorded and represented are implicit.