“Laterne, Laterne, Sonne, Mond und Sterne, brenne auf mein Licht, aber nur meine liebe Laterne nicht” (Lantern, lantern, sun, moon, and stars, shine on my light but don’t burn my little lantern): the artist sang this as a child in the St. Martin’s Day procession, the children all swinging their lanterns made of cartons and wax paper. Martin Honert incorporates childhood memories into his artistic practice. In Laterne, of which he made two identical versions differing only in size, he covered the aluminum frame of a cube with four large-format slides mounted on UV film. The four sides of the room-sized lantern show a square room bathed in the bluish black of night and open to the star-studded sky above. They all picture the same situation from a different spatial perspective: a man resting on pillows, seen from the foot, side, and back of the bed and from the window. It is the artist himself, watching Spacenight on the television at the foot of the bed, a program that has been running on the Bavarian TV channel BR since 1994 and that broadcasts satellite images of the earth instead of test patterns. Apparently, he is about to sit up.

The subject matter was inspired by Theodor Storm’s good night story Little Hobbin (1849), about a little boy tossing and turning in bed because he can’t fall asleep. The moon finally comes to his rescue and helps him sail through the world in his bed. The closed room affords a view of the interior on all four sides and has the disconcerting feature of being open to the sky. The hospital-like situation is clearly caring but also looks uncomfortably exposed. The child’s dreamy view of the world takes an uncanny turn and converges with the canny ability of the fine arts to show a simultaneity of things that cannot be simultaneous.