The paradox of light, which stands as the ultimate proxy of the paradox of any human experience, is articulated by Fishkin through his characteristically literal presentation of the discourse of classical mechanics, which, when charged with the Sisyphean task of answering metaphysical questions, begins to speak in allegories. Two light bulbs, each on its own side of a two-sided lever, are switched on, one after the other, each “burdening” its own side to the point where that side yields to the force of gravity and sinks lower. This mischievous behaviour on the part of light, however, also has an irrefutably inquisitive undertone, which arises from questions about materiality and non-materiality, our physical reality and the concepts that are supposed to explain it. The causal sequence of the light coming on and gravity taking effect brings us, in its counter-intuitiveness, inevitably back to the fact that our life, with all the wealth of its experiences, is necessarily bound to the materiality of physical existence. The reason why the light’s extraordinary behaviour so pointedly underlines the agonizing rupture between the material and the non-material worlds may also lie in the fact that in our day-to-day imaginaries light is often a metaphor, even a sign, of the presence of the non-material: the bulb that lights up above the head of a cartoon character in a eureka moment; the shining light at the end of a long passageway glimpsed by those rare witnesses of near-death experiences; and so on. Light, then, is a sign that we are separating ourselves from the weight, the gravitational pull, of the material realm, that life and/or the experience of life is passing into the non-material dimension. Not least of all, this is what we are told by the long (and for art so essential) tradition of Neoplatonism and the metaphysics of the light which emanates from the purity of the non-material source and which, as it passes into darkness, creates the material world.The light bulb is lowered, then, not by any weight that might derive from mass (which light does not have) but rather by the burden of metaphysical questions that confront us. As is always the case with Fishkin, humour is the brother of existential angst and both are the children of the fundamental doubt inscribed within us. Consequently, his seesaw of light is the multilayered image of the back-and-forth exchange of both humour and anxiety, but also, simultaneously, of the incompatibility between the physicality of our experience and its maxims, the mutual conditionality of illusion and truth. The amphibious materiality of light in its simultaneous omnipresence and intangibility, between its obviousness and the impossibility of ever satisfactorily comprehending it, speaks above all to the questionable status of material reality as our fundamental experience.

A second work in the exhibition shares in such questioning: although titled Windy, it could similarly be described as Light Weight, since here, too, the weight of the paper that appears to be sent flying when a fan is switched on is in fact the same as light. You will forgive me if I take this line of interpretation too far and see ourselves in this scattered paper. But are we not similar to these sheets of paper, which are blown about by a wind that turns out not to be there? And yet, the fact that we are not set into motion by a mighty wind but that everything is merely part of a grand illusion, does not in the slightest change the dance of our searching. And especially not its beauty.
Vladimir Vidmar