Mathias Kessler

The Year Without a Summer

It Is a Lie That the Sky Is Blue

Mathias Kessler’s (b. Kempten, 1968; lives and works in New York) oeuvre grapples with environmental destruction and how it interacts with Romantic landscape painting. In his Light Phenomena series, he defamiliarizes the skies in historic paintings by J.M.W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, or Edgar Degas, turning them into airbrushed gradient paintings he contrasts with recent photographs taken at the same scenes to visualize atmospheric changes of the past two hundred years.

The compositions harness the historic paintings as a visual archive of the sky. Capturing light and clouds, they can be read as representations of past climate conditions—a way of looking at them that also inspires the research of the climate scientist and chemist Christos Zerefos. The work revisits the year 1816, the “Year Without a Summer,” when a volcanic eruption darkened the skies, which had a lasting impact on visual art as well as literature—and prompted the appearance of intense reds in depictions of the sky.

The Year Without a Summer conceives of painting as a both sensory and documentary memory. The publication gathers contributions by Adam Hudec, Chiara Juriatti, and the artist as well as interviews with Michael Wang and Christos Zerefos. It illustrates how the clear cerulean blue of yore is becoming a fiction—and our sky itself, an archive of our ecological present and future.