EXIT | Florian Reinhardt

“Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”

 

- Sol Lewitt,

Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.

Exit signs, waypoints punctuating our daily experience. Ubiquitous to the point of banality, we see without seeing these signifiers of our constructed realities. Photographs of exit signs – deliberately affectless, depersonalised, and repetitive – are both a reflection on Warhol’s multiple ‘assembly line’ works, and a subversive appropriation of  our global language.

This series of 1024 exit signs, taken over ten years as spontaneous gestures, not staged or planned, form a coherent pictorial strategy. Inverting a telescope on the mundane, the signs are photographed close-up, with minimal background context. Depriving the viewer of scale and cultural references, the signs are universalised, and elevated to the realm of symbol. Drawing on Adorno’s theory of Mimesis, they form an archive, framed like specimens pinned on a card.

But the series moves beyond the obvious readymade associations, with each work serving not only as a reminder of a specific place and time, but as a trigger for situational awareness and philosophical reflection. Corresponding to situation where the artist felt physically present but mentally detached, each exit sign led to a moment of clarity, a call to action.

The exit signs are more than a physical navigation point, they aim to create an awareness of the situations we find ourselves in. They are a signal to wake up, to be present.

In this constructed reality, the exit sign is a catalyst for reflection: who am I, what am I, where am I going?

At times we navigate our lives on auto-pilot. The exit signs speak of an urgency: be present.