COSMOGONY
Cosmogony / Space-time
Space-time is a monumental work on 8 wood panels measuring 240 x 170 cm in total. A private commission, it is the result of a series of conversations between the collector and the artist, both of whom share a great fascination for physics.
The panels are separate elements that together form a slice of space-time. The slice is like a movie still which represents a moment of ‘being’ that is no longer possible. An instant that has passed. The artists here asks questions about the paradox of our reality in relation to our experience. We seem to be locked in by the limitations of time and space, and especially by the direction of time when it passes. We cannot travel back to the moment we desire most, the moment that has already happened. Yet our emotion of love never lets go, it stays tied in that inertial frame.
Noppen’s work often incorporates references to cinema. Our human inability to understand and cope with the universe we live in is something that seems to surface in all of Noppen’s work. Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ explores the failure of man when confronted with the grotesqueness of our universe. Noppen alludes to this cinematic masterpiece in this painting by turning the bookcase into a three-dimensional wall that acts as a portal to portray the ‘impossible’ revisiting of that moment of desire.