| ˈmelən ˈfɑːs |  -  Melan Phos

Melan Phos – a visual study in monochrome, shaped over fifteen years between sea and mountain, silence and movement.This series reflects Franz Xaver Aicher’s ongoing engagement with elemental geographies – alpine ridges, oceanic depths, fleeting light. Captured exclusively in black and white, the works inhabit a space between document and reduction, between stillness and transformation.

They are not composed in the conventional sense. Rather, they are carved from physical endurance – moments beneath the surface, at altitude, or in sustained, almost meditative observation. The camera functions less as recorder than as a perceptual organ – exposed, responsive, embedded.From a curatorial perspective, Melan Phos can be read as an inquiry into the limits of photographic legibility.Drawing from traditions of abstract landscape, phenomenological image theory, and post-minimalist aesthetics, the series resists both the romantic and the representational. Instead, it searches for a visual syntax that allows presence and disappearance to coexist.

The use of monochrome is not nostalgic, but strategic: it strips the image down to its essential architecture – light, shadow, line, texture. What remains is not a scene, but a state. Not a depiction, but a threshold.

Melan Phos – μέλας φῶς, “dark light” – becomes a conceptual paradox: a space where perception dissolves into feeling, and clarity folds back into mystery.