Adrien Iz Nettere is an artist and designer who works with light and images. Using ceramic and illuminated panels, Nettere’s constructions indulge fiction and projection. 

Nettere’s work stages encounters dense with latent projections present in perception. Through repetition, the image wavers into a sign that stands in for rather than recovers the image’s object. The viewer finds reflected back an opaque exteriority, a felt absence in place of the thing itself. 

For Nettere, this absence is not a finality. His intention is not to look away, but to find a form of relation attentive to the gap between sign and meaning. Drawn to the contours and affordances of unknowability, Nettere views the image-objects as silhouettes and scaffolds, exterior forms that are protective of a mutable interiority and a subject that remains in motion. 

Nettere is interested in what arises in the space between things: between a thing and its image, fiction between neurobiological memory and its narration, and projection across what Janet Malcolm calls a “dense thicket of absent others” in interpersonal encounter. Light, a nonmaterial thing making contact with objects, like fiction, traverses this distance without closure. In the phenomenal impossibility of stable contact, Nettere develops a devotional orientation towards this distance by way of image, surface, and container.