The haunted darkness ---- Christian Boltanski

I felt an instant connection with Christian's works the first time I saw them on Internet. When I was little I was extremely scared of death and darkness; I was haunted by the same couple of nightmares for a long time, they played alternately over and over in my mind during my sleep. The extreme loneliness and fear was far beyond a child's capability of adapting. The moment I saw Christian's work, those feelings came back; old memories of feelings were awakened. It must be painful for him to create so many art pieces out of the far, unreachable and untouchable darkness.

This scene is very similar to one of my nightmares, except for the lights and the metal shelves with drawers. In my dream, I was walking through an narrow aisle like this with wooden shelves with rectangular cells. Each cell has a wooden box containing the ashes of a dead person, and there is a picture of that person on the box (just like this art piece) in the middle; and other boxes with other pictures of the dead. Some natural light is searching through between the shelves, and there are a lot of darkness and shadows. Now you know why I had the connection with the artist. This piece is called 'dead swiss', which has nothing to do with my dream. I don't know what's the relationship between these dead people with the artist. It doesn't matter that much because I didn't know any of those dead people in my dream.

His work is like a haunted depression normal people cannot bear, at least not for too long. But I think there is an amount of darkness in every single human, at least at certain stage. The artist might have experienced more than normal people, that's why he magnified these feelings in his art.

This piece seems to show the fragility of life by displaying these dead children's pictures heads. Most of his works are black and while, a little blurred: a way to increase the haunted atmosphere.

His work would match Portishead's music really well. There is a deep, thoughtful soul in the artist, suspended in the process of dying. There is no sadness, there is no tears, just darkness, silent, endless depression.