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THE GAME WITH ILLUSION - THE PARADOX
Text by Birgit Szepanski

A white room with a grey floor. Photos, sketches and collages on the walls. A table in the middle with three architect’s models on it. This white room now exists, at themmoment when it is imagined by the reader of this text. At the same time, it is Sinta Werner’s studio, with its white walls and grey floor and the table with three architect’s, models in the middle. Sinta Werner takes up this kind of puzzling analogy between an imagined image and reality and makes it the subject of her room designs and material collages, which she places in various exhibition spaces and buildings.
One of the models on Sinta Werner’s studio table shows a trapezoidal room with square window frames. A balustrade runs between the walls parallel to the window, with a heating radiator hung in its centre. Inside this room, and just ten centimetres away from the wall with the window, the room is replicated in card: the window frame, two walls, the balustrade, the radiator and a floor that rises gradually to the back. This cut paper model has been stuck together with narrow shadow lines in miniature and it represents a precise duplication of the room within the model of the room. And there is also a much larger version of this same idea in an ideal room 1. Here the colours are sparse, due to the materials used: concrete grey walls, brass window struts, the white painted iron of the radiator and the plastic control dial on it.
The moment when the viewers walk into the gallery 2 and think they are in the exhibition space is the moment when for a second only one side of the puzzling image is present: an image of the room. This image becomes precarious, however, when the viewers step further inside. The echoes of their steps sound wooden, hollow and unreal. A game of illusions begins. The floor is not made of concrete. There are grey streaks on the wall around the window, the wooden floor slopes upwards and becomes narrower as it nears the window – here Sinta Werner uses perspective to create an illusion of space. The heating regulator is a simple cardboard substitute, and the balustrade is made of light plywood.
Looking out of the remake of the window, you see the real window and the real balustrade, both a little lower down. This in turn shifts the perspective of the view from the real window onto the street. There is a sudden mirror effect, as duplication and layering in the glass of the window leads viewers to wonder for a moment whether what they are seeing is an optical illusion. The illusion is quickly destroyed when they realize that their own mirror images are missing, but a sense of confusion and disorientation remains. The viewers are standing in this room in a room 3 in something like a stage set. Sinta Werner has constructed this so as to create illusory images concerning the dissolution of a specific space. But the reconstruction of the room is not just a means to an end. It is also conceived and created as an image in its own right, with the measurements and details deriving from the real room, and the component parts cut in wood or card, varnished or painted. Sinta Werner produces her stage sets for her games of illusion in an almost painterly manner, devising similarities without wanting to simulate perfection. The original image she creates remains autonomous – an image of an illusion with its own seductive power and reality. Thus Sinta Werner establishes a room as something eminently pictorial, and as an image against which both reality and illusion can be measured. To deconstruct an illusion and return it to the profane world of reality is latently subversive; Sinta Werner confronts the viewers with an undefined state of affairs that causes them to doubt their own perception. This leads to a destructive moment in which control is lost. The viewers are standing within a stage-like reality that refers to a real space but also engenders various misperceptions. The ground under our feet begins to shake.
In her photo and copy collages, Sinta Werner very precisely pursues the idea of cutting up, dissolving, and displacing interior spaces, views from windows, and façades of buildings. The use of the scalpel creates a razor-sharp line 4. Here the idea of selecting and extracting by cutting develops a subtle subversive force. Unlike the installations and room structures, the collages are images and remain images; they seem both stringent and yet variable. They give rise to a horrifying and playful desire to transfer the idea of dissection and dissolution and apply it to countless other spaces, rooms and buildings.
Since Luis Bu˜nuels metaphorical cut with a shaving knife, the act of cutting has come to refer to an act of cognition: being compelled to recognise a true moment behind an image that already exists. The reality of the image and the manifestation of the act of disillusionment are interlinked – this is a dual image for the act of cognition. A loss of a reality that has been hitherto accepted is also a physically existential moment. With her variations on deception and loss of realities, Sinta Werner again and again evokes this kind of moment of (re)cognition in the viewer. She turns viewers into protagonists who enter her stage-like rooms and fall prey to the illusions, but then become like detectives or explorers, exposing the tricks and decoding the constructions and illusions – as the observers of their own perception of their own selves. In a similar way to the Teatro Farnese 5 Sinta Werner calculates the location of the optimal point where the viewers will be subjected to the perspectivist illusion of space. And at the same time the three-dimensional backdrops are a stage set in themselves – a stage for the act of observation itself. Teatro Farnese is a trapezoidal room in which a floor that rises continuously towards the back evokes an illusion of great depth. Sinta Werner makes use of this perspective effect suggesting depth in her room installation such as in the work >Dissolve<.
In her installation >Disjunction< 6 the perspective is not accentuated, whereas the fixed standing point also plays a major role. Visitors step into a building that was once a Victorian public baths 7 and then walk along a corridor past empty changing cubicles into the atrium. The latter has been turned into an empty white cube suitable for exhibitions by inserting temporary walls and grey flooring. Immediately the viewers’ gaze is drawn to a mirror image of the Victorian changing cubicles and the atrium in the left corner of this exhibition space. But it is not a mirror image, even if the number on cubicle 6 is seen the wrong way around as if in a mirror. The viewers can now step into this slightly elevated stage set and thus decode the deceptively real replication of a real room. On then turning round they can see the same section of the corridor with the cubicles, but this time again for real – complete with aging wood, glue and varnish. As the viewers explore them in this way, the sections of the room, the Victorian ornaments, and the corridors of the building all become intertwined. The architecture of the building, its replication and the perspectives on both the real and the not-real that ensue evoke a strangely ambiguous architecture. A second layer of reality is created by oscillating images of illusions and deception, present and past.
A mise en scène 8 describes a theatre or film production set in which the location of the action is clearly measured out and equipped with the required objects or props. The positions and paths of the protagonists within this space are precisely planned. Concrete points of reference serve to define the space, creating proximity and distance between the stage set and the protagonists and thus making it possible for the viewer to reconstruct a fictional space.

The office of a gallery 9 has been equipped with a bar (that also serves as a desk to work at), and a shelf on the wall for files and books. This everyday scene from a gallery is simple, austere and functional. There are two members of staff sitting at computers, who might be the protagonists of a mise en scène. There is also a wooden frame as large as the room 10 behind which Sinta Werner has built a second office interior 11 that duplicates the office room like a mirror image. This illusion of a mirror image of the office is held upright until the viewers realise that neither they themselves nor the gallery staff are mirrored in it. For one moment the whole scene becomes unreal and surreal. Is the replicated office a model, a design for a stage set of an office in which the protagonists will follow stage directions, or are the staff themselves acting within the reflection of a fictional draft?
Sinta Werner’s models of rooms are not just paper models on her table in her studio, but they are also staged rooms that are placed within real rooms, as they create not only an effective puzzle based on illusion and reality but are also the model of their own idea. Just like a real stage set Sinta Werner’s constructed rooms can be dismantled down to their components and stored in an archive. They consist of the components that can be put together to make a room in a room, and a reality within reality. They are indifferent and without a real essence, a paradox unto themselves. The fact that these models and the basic idea can be varied and replicated amounts literally to a game with illusion 12 that Sinta Werner stages so as to leave a world of confusion and distortion, mirroring and imagination in the viewers’ pictorial memory.

© NETTIE HORN