Thorax2019

Rattling, diamond shaped refractions of light: a projector? fluorescent tubes? It turns out to be more like a "human machine" the filmmaker is dissecting with a fine surgical blade. And so commences an imagined dolly shot into the bloodless, post-humanoid body, travelling into an abstract space that occasionally seems to become concrete of its own accord before dissolving back into glistening streaks and ultimately, wide expanses: a cinematic worm hole leading behind the images, where the sluggish human eye is and must be subject to a trick of light arrangements.

Compared to previous works, Siegfried A. Fruhauf ́s THORAX remains almost entirely abstract. But it is all the more intrinsically concerned with an examination of the history of film and perception: Like Marcel Duchamp ́s ANÉMIC CINEMA (1926) which serves as its catalyst, THORAX largely avoids glimpsing the organic: once upon a time there was life. And yet in the stroboscopic flickering of THORAX there does appear to be an immaterial torso trying to fight its way back onto the screen. And deep inside, it is not surprising that a heart is beating in that cinematic machine reminiscent of the vaulted tunnel of Cern, in which light particles are accelerated and collide to fathom time and space – structures that Fruhauf has been investigating in his works all along – off and beyond the beaten track of mere representation and what is apparent.

It is said one must not look into the sun, to prevent a child ́s visual urge to discover from damaging eyesight. Sharing affinities with Fruhauf ́s early film SUN (2003), THORAX in contrast fuels adolescent irrationality and curiosity. At some point, we look with wide open eyes into the dazzling light, accompanied by threatening clusters of sound and subtly arranged provocative sounds. A wildly mesmerizing light. The light at the end of the tunnel. (Sebastian Höglinger)

It’s cinema’s greatest “trip” since the journey “beyond the infinite” in Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Fruhauf immerses us in an illusion of endless movement, changing colour, vibrant perception. But where are we going? Only semiscraps of representational objects can be faintly discerned amidst the flashing kaleidoscope of frames: a diamond, a bridge, a tower, an eye? The ambient soundscape suggests drilling and construction. But a more abstract, intermittent picture forms in our minds: the pulsating heart at the centre of a body; the cinema-engine itself housed inside an imaginary thorax. (Adrian Martin)