Alwin LAY | Dura broken Lex

An espresso or a wine spritzer – sometimes hot, sometimes cold – but always in the same glass. Namely, the drinking glass “Picardie” made by Duralex, which in the meantime has become iconic. We’ve all had one in our hands – sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the evening. Objects of daily use are often invisible. They interact with us, and we with them, without our really perceiving them. And sometimes that is precisely what constitutes good design. Alwin LAY has engaged with these robust and specially hardened glasses. By means of analogue, lens-based (and therefore glass-based) photography, he has visually dealt with these, in the 70th anniversary year of this industrial revolution of 1954. All of the photographed glass objects were retrospectively shattered, employing an AI programme – hence the title of the exhibition, “Dura broken Lex”. In a miniscule moment the glasses shatter – not into the crumbs of safety glass but into calculated splinters and fissures of artificial intelligence. With this “rupture” caused by AI, LAY thematises the interface between technology and handicraft. The generative potential of machine learning is utilised in order to react visually to the analogue world of photography. The boundary between information, image, and object becomes blurred. The work challenges us to consider the industrial era in the context of today’s AI revolution, and prompts an intellectual game regarding to what extent AI could influence us in the future, in the perception and configuration of objects. In the presentation as well, LAY interleaves classical methods such as the print on baryta paper, a hallmark of classical black-and-white photography, and the lightly scaled size proportions of the eight glasses, which correspond to the actual sizes of the glass design, with a fictional layer of meaning. Inspired by the Latin – “Dura Lex, Sed Lex” (“The law is hard, but it is the law”), in this confrontation with glass, the question regarding our reality (whatever this might be) and its legitimacy is also pursued. And, as is so often the case, the question of the verisimilitude of the medium of photography, and at the same time in LAY’s work, is thematised – since everything, in the view of the artist, is somehow reality and at the same time also a ‘lie’ that challenges us. Photography is thus interrogated as a construction of reality and part of how we perceive our environment and also how we form that which is depicted, and even also how its fragility becomes visible in the act of shattering.