Lazy Mike presents Daniel Lergon’s solo exhibition Auflösung. Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in Seoul, the presentation debuts a new body of paintings centered on the relationship between light and surface and on perceptual experience, opening new possibilities for contemporary abstract painting.

“My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it.”

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Retroreflection is the phenomenon whereby light striking a surface returns along its incoming path rather than scattering at various angles. Typically used in road signs, safety garments, and traffic infrastructure to enhance visibility, this form of reflection does not fix the surface as a static image; rather, it shifts continuously according to the viewer’s bodily position, angle of gaze, and lighting conditions, ceaselessly revealing itself.

Over the past two decades, Daniel Lergon has introduced advanced industrial optical technologies into the language of painting, consistently posing the question not of “what to paint” but of “under what conditions something becomes visible.” In his early works on retroreflective fabric with transparent lacquer, he experimented with perceptual gaps that momentarily appear and vanish, rather than fixing or constructing form. The colors generated through metal powders and oxidation were understood not as inherent properties of pigment itself but as reactions arising from material transformation. His subsequent series using single pigments formed part of a process that closely traced perceptual shifts across density, matière, and transparency.

Lergon’s work runs parallel to art historical currents while subtly varying them, establishing itself as a new formal language. His tonal contrasts, loosely evoking chiaroscuro, no longer serve as tools for constructing form; they have become a stage where visibility and invisibility intersect, where one gauges the strata of layers. His use of single colors, reminiscent of monochrome painting, emerges not as an independent formal statement of color itself but as a transient “phenomenon” within the interplay of transparent lacquer, acrylic binder, and retroreflective particles. Lergon’s practice thus occupies a trajectory distinct from the dogmas of the previous century—reductive abstraction and the pursuit of purity. Underlying his painterly context is an intense preoccupation with materiality and a deep-rooted curiosity toward science, particularly optics and cosmology.

The exhibition Auflösung pursues a new transformation upon the structure of Lichtung, that of dissolution. The artist applies earth in thin membranes, layers single pigments (Prussian blue, cadmium orange, azo red, dioxazine violet, among others) alongside grey retroreflective pigment, and uses brushes, cloth, and plastic sheets to push and drag the paint; this bodily action alters the density and trajectory of each material, filling the picture plane not with deliberate composition but with the temporality left behind by material reactions. The works in the exhibition begin at a quasi-figurative or semi-abstract starting point—vertically, from the stratum—pass gradually through the rupture and dispersion of imagery, and arrive finally at grey surfaces where the boundaries of form are nearly dissolved. This is not simply the end of figuration but a sequence of processes in which each material alters the conditions of the others, reconstituting the field of perception, where all compositional elements, including light, interact and constantly reproduce the modes of emergence.

To recapitulate, retroreflection is the reflection that returns along its incoming path. Accordingly, Lergon’s painting is less a “return” that traces and reverses art history, and more a self-referential “recursion” in which the work reflects upon and validates itself through the conditions created by its materials. Rather than directly inheriting the genealogy of painting concerned with light or the transition toward non-representation, it illuminates and renews itself through the material occasions that constitute it. And Auflösung—dissolution—becomes the ground for this renewal.

Daniel Lergon (b. 1978, Germany) graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts and has held more than forty solo exhibitions, including Auflösung (forthcoming) (Lazy Mike, Seoul) in 2025; Flow (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź) in 2024; Umbra (Galerie Christian Lethert, Cologne), Clareira (Lehmann + Silva, Porto), and Lichtung (PSM, Berlin) in 2022; Lines and Grids (Galleria Mario Iannelli, Rome) in 2021; and Correspondance Métallique (Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels) in 2013. As for major group exhibitions, he has participated in over one hundred, including Nicht viel zu sehen. Wege der Abstraktion 1920 bis heute (Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal) in 2024; Gemischter Satz (Galerie Crone, Vienna) in 2022; We aim to live (Zuzeum, Riga) in 2020; and Double Rotation (Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen) in 2015.