Residue

This is photography. No double exposures or Photoshopping; just pure photography. Asia-based Dutch artist Marcel Heijnen has developed a simple yet unique method to capture and present an alternate visual reality of our world using just a camera and an untreated clear glass panel.

He roams Asia’s urban centres to find weathered walls, places a large glass pane in front of them, and then waits for the light to hit nearby buildings just so. For a fleeting moment, he can capture their reflections while the patina of the wall behind it steals through. Two realities collapsed into one in a single moment.

In these dreamlike visions, it feels as if the organic distress of the wall is happening to the architecture itself – and that is precisely the point. The future contains its past and the past reveals its future, and the only time to experience this is right now, in the present moment.

Residue is about duality and paradox. The old versus the new, the geometric versus the organic, urbanisation versus nature – tensions that ultimately lead to some kind of equilibrium, like a perpetual dance between decay and renewal.