NADA Miami 2023

Rosa Lueders’ series of wall ornaments titled Diamond tattoos (2023) draws on the realistic looking but fake diamond tattoo, which applied to the body temporarily, is used as a playful accessory. While being diamonds in disguise the oversized sparkling stones, made out of polyurethane and applied directly to the wall, do not pretend to be what they are not. The imitation of a crystalline diamond becomes a replica of a desire to posses beauty in it’s materiality thereby sliding into a prospect of play and decorative deception. Meticulously attached, stone by stone to the chrome foil, the ornaments yield sublime adornment – manifested yet without commitment. The formation of the stones that reminds the viewer of enchanted fairy tale blooming is interrupted by missing parts. Traces of glue appear as a delicate glimmer outlining the complete ornament and thereby capturing the fragility of beauty. The wall ornaments, perfect and imperfect at the same time, challenge the thought that all beauty is fated to extinction. That beauty will vanish by its very own transience. In fact, Lueders’ takes up Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on transience in which he stipulates that beauty lies within transience itself.

‘Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment. It was incomprehensible, I declared, that the thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it. As regards the beauty of Nature, each time it is destroyed by winter it comes again next year, so that in relation to the length of our lives it can in fact be regarded as eternal’.

Diamond tattoos therefore manifest the idea that beauty, regardless of its state, can persist and escape all powers of destruction and should not interfere with our joy at any time.