Rémy Markowitsch’s works are based on examinations of themes as diverse as literature and research, expeditions and discoveries, the appropriation of the foreign, colonialism, the passion of collecting and addiction. At the same time they reflect the use of different media – photography, books, video or language. The light - Illuminating, elucidating, transluminating – plays a central role.
Rémy Markowitsch puts on a headlamp, as it were, to explore the visual order of books, specifically, the photographs he finds in them of plants, animals, people and landscapes. He takes pictures of what appears when one page of a book is transluminated, that is, when the motifs that appear on two sides of a single page are seen simultaneously, creating a new visual cipher: in this case, one plus one is more than two. Most of Markowitsch’s photographs are based on his technique of translumination, as also in the series “We are family” (2010), which refers to a series of three fluoroscopies, extracted from the book “Screened Bodies? (X-ray images)” by Dr. Karl Döhmann. Here, he adds a new aspect to the transillumination body of work, as far as they are transilluminations (of the page) of transilluminations (the X-ray images). „Also in "ALPS" Rémy Markowitsch deals with the book as medium regarding its material qualities by raying pages with pictures, thus making them transparent, and generating new hybrid and former quasi unconscious images. Concerning the monochrome picture of mountains a confusing, disconcerting point of view arises by using this technique which gets up and down, left and right mixed up - almost as if one would watch the panorama falling from the mountaintop instead of staying in the safe position as alpine tourist. Thus in "ALP 02" emerges not only the image of a - politically often abused - safe and ideal mountain scene (the work's source is one of the annual books of Swiss Alpine Club) but also the dark, threatening side of the mountains.“* (* Isabel Fluri)
