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• Flavia Gomes
Flavia Gomes
The Sacred in Light
In her recent body of work, Christiane Monz composes a deeply spiritual terrain through a series of collage, using light as a visual motif and as a metaphysical force. Drawing inspiration from the narrative richness of Gothic and Victorian stained-glass windows, forms she has long admired for their chromatic storytelling and architectural gravitas, she revisits the cathedral as a vessel for illumination, both literal and symbolic.
Growing up in Germany, Monz early exposure to Northern European Gothic art fostered a sensitivity to how light passes through history, belief, and ornament. This awareness found a contemporary echo during a visit to the Tate Collection exhibition in Shanghai, where the artist encountered works by the Pre-Raphaelites and contemporary luminaries like Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell, artists for whom light is not only medium but subject, space, and spiritual catalyst.
Christiane Monz’s practice, rooted in photography and collage, carries these traditions into new geographies and contexts. Traveling through remote and often mountainous regions of Southeast Asia, particularly in Northern Yunnan, a region historically linked to Tibetan Buddhist culture, she captures images of light as it enters and escapes everyday structures: a shaft piercing a sheer curtain, the glow of an interior room through a dusk-lit window, the flicker of artificial light among rural paths. These photographs are printed multiple times, then carefully cut and reassembled by hand, often following a strict geometry of sharp angles and repeated forms. The artist's cuts echo both the discipline of architectural tracery and the spontaneity of light itself, propagating its presence like echoes from a sacred chant.
In these works, collage becomes an act of reverence. As she lifts everyday moments from their contexts and reframes them, Monz reveals a layered visual theology—one that finds the sacred not in grand edifices, but in the fragile, ephemeral touch of light on a wall. In the Enlightening series, the collages shimmer with a kind of quiet ecstasy, as if light itself were proclaiming presence. Accentuating invites viewers into an intimate meditation, where composition becomes contemplation. And in Revealing, shadow and structure interplay behind paper tracery and translucent photographs housed in light boxes, invoking the mystery of what lies behind the visible.
There is a kinship here with the early photographic experiments of László Moholy-Nagy, in which light becomes line, shadow becomes form, and the camera becomes a spiritual instrument. Likewise, Monz’s cathedral-glass-like cutouts—delicate white paper forms overlaid on luminous collaged imagery—suggest a visual liturgy, referencing both the devotional windows of European cathedrals and the ritual architectures of Buddhist temples. Yet, unlike these built spaces, her work proposes that spirituality does not require a fixed structure—only attention, presence, and faith in the everyday.
Christiane Monz’s use of light boxes underscores this belief: they do not illuminate the sacred, they reveal that it has always been there. In a world often dimmed by distraction, Monz’s work gently insists that light—when seen, followed, and assembled—can restore our awareness of the divine, in every place, and in everything.
Flavia Gomes
Art Curator, Writer & Researcher
Shanghai 2025
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