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Bernhard Musil

ROYAL CHAOS #1-15
layered art project

“Royal chaos” departs from the gestalt psychological term “Übersummativität”: the concept that, where personal experience is involved, the total is more than the sum of its parts.

Employing the photographic techniques of double exposure and superimposition, Bernhard Musil plunges the viewer into a controlled chaos of images created with up to thirty different photographic layers.

The source images hail from often unrelated fields and eras. Musil mainly focuses on religion, fashion and the erotic, as well as urban impressions, geometrical structures and reproductions of classical paintings and historical documentation.

Referencing Italian Mannerism and the Habsburg baroque, the various images combine to create a “Gesamtkunstwerk”, an orgiastic interaction of disciplines whose borders blur.

Musil‘s work highlights the complexity of everyday experiences, wherein internal streams of thoughts, impressions and semi-conscious associations are idiosyncratically interlinked.

Rather than dictating one particular “way of seeing”, the images offer a composite of individual associations, a matrix for numerous subjective visions woven into a multidi- mensitonal space of shifting forms and colors.