Nuremberg. History Always Repeats Itself Twice
The installation Nuremberg. History Always Repeats Itself Twice reconstructs the door and the two windows of Room 600 at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, the courtroom in which the historic trials were held in 1945. Within the CGAC’s double exhibition space, the two works face one another, echoing the original spatial configuration of the courtroom.
The door is rendered as a trompe-l’œil painting in oil on wood, almost life-size. It reproduces the marble and bronze door, yet reverses it as if seen in a mirror. At its centre, a black opening takes the place of the original wooden door, introducing a dark presence, a void that opens within the representation itself.
The windows, painted in oil on linen, return to one of painting’s oldest metaphors: the window as a threshold between two spaces. Unlike the originals, which remained closed throughout the trials, these windows appear open.
1 October 1946. 2:54 pm fixes the precise moment at which the reading of the verdict came to an end, four minutes after it had begun. At this exact moment, the windows open symbolically. It is the end of the trial and of the war, but also the beginning of a new international legal order. Through the panes, the golden and orange light of the setting sun enters the room, introducing a temporal and dramatic dimension—a last light before the darkness of night.
The facing windows are reflected in the marble and bronze of the door, allowing the two paintings to enter into dialogue through their own images. Reflection becomes both a formal device and a means of connection: each work contains, in some way, the presence of the other.
Immersed in a subdued, twilight-like light, the installation creates a suspended space in which memory, justice, representation, and time converge. The courtroom is no longer simply reconstructed as a historical site; it becomes a space between presence and absence, between what has been witnessed and what remains to be seen. The architecture is returned to us as an image, and the image, in turn, returns us to history.
Nuremberg. History Always Repeats Itself Twice.
2022-2025 | Oil on wood | 535x327x22 cm
Nuremberg. History Always Repeats Itself Twice
Regarding the inversion of the image of the door to Room 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, I would like to stress that, for me, this is not simply a formal gesture, but an act of positioning. The painting appears doubled, reversed as though in a mirror, and this doubling brings its inherent ambivalence to the fore: between use and representation, document and symbol, memory and the present.
History—and, in particular, the history surrounding the Nuremberg Trials—is never fully brought to closure. It repeats, reflects itself, and returns in altered forms. The mirror-like duplication of the image underscores precisely this condition: every historical image already contains its own echo, its own possibility of return.
This work continues my earlier investigations into trompe-l’œil, placing the door, once again, before an imaginary mirror. Here, trompe-l’œil is not merely a device of optical illusion, but a critical apparatus. It situates the image within a political and unstable field in which reality and representation are held in tension, each continually questioning the status of the other.
Throughout the history of painting, the mirror has operated as a lens through which to consider the construction of the image and its inherently ambiguous status. In this painting, the mirror becomes a metaphor for historical consciousness: a surface through which the past is not simply contemplated, but returned to us as an active and unresolved presence.
As Emanuele Coccia suggests, any form or thing that emerges outside its own place becomes an image. It is precisely in this displacement—between the original image and its reflection—that a space of consciousness opens up. This distance is what interests me: the interval between reality and the symbolic reality produced by art. It is within this interval that an experience takes shape, one that does not seek to impose a closed narrative, but rather to suspend meaning and allow the viewer to inhabit a state of uncertainty.
The work offers no explicit interpretation of history. Instead, it presents apparently “objective” elements: architectural fragments, details, surfaces. Yet their full scale and meticulous technical precision endow them with a visual intensity that is difficult to evade. The image—the sensory dimension of the image—is not reflected in the illusion of three-dimensionality on the painted surface, but in the gaze that encounters it.
The viewer moves between the displaced image of the place itself and the memory of its original location. They occupy an intermediate territory: between the reality of the artwork and its historical mirror; between the political conditions of the present and their reflection in the past. Within this space of ambivalence, so characteristic of trompe-l’œil, history ceases to function as a fixed narrative and becomes instead a surface that reflects us back to ourselves.
Lluís Hortalà
1 of octobre of 1946. 2:54 pm.
2024-2025 | Oil on linen | 285x195 cm e/u
