These are portraits of absence. In each Credo, the unmistakable likeness of Beethoven begins to surface, drawn from Joseph Karl Stieler’s 1820 painting. Where Stieler captured the composer mid-creation, surrounded by Romantic landscape and colour, here the image recedes into black. Detail thins. Light is rationed.
Across the series, small variations unfold — shifts in density and contrast — but the effect remains constant: a near-erasure that asks not only to be seen, but searched. Faces flicker. Forests withdraw. The Credo of the Missa solemnis hovers in Beethoven’s hand, barely legible.
These are not homages. They are reductions. Stripped of vibrancy and placed behind reflective glass, the portraits become encounters in which the viewer’s own image slips into the frame. Genius dissolves into surface. The gaze is returned, darker and less certain.
What remains is not the certainty of the composer, but the interval around him — the solitude of listening, the breath before affirmation. Something once declared now hovers in suspension.
Exhibited:
Credo, Beethoven Haus Bonn 2015.
The Times they are a–changing. Galerie Bastian, Berlin. 2018.
Hotel Beethoven, Bozar Brussels. 2020 ,
Beethoven im Blick moderner und historisher Kunst - Kulturhaus Zanders Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. 2015.
LUDWIG VAN : Le Mythe Beethoven Philharmonie de Paris. Paris. 2016.
Further reading:
Credo I-V: Exhibition catalogue, Beethoven Haus, Bonn
Ludwig Van Le Mythe Beethoven Galliard Cite de la musique Philharmonie de Paris
