“Contemplate the beauty of life. Look at the stars and imagine yourself running alongside them.”
Marc Aureli
Understanding that the simplest form can contain infinite energy, Dominic Kiessling’s installation that will inhabit the Hall of Mirrors of the Gran Teatre del Liceu is an unexpected presence: a large-scale inflatable star during this season’s Christmas period. Far from anecdote or decorative gesture, the piece unfolds a subtle reflection on space, perception, and the capacity of art to transform collective experience through essential forms.
The star, a universal archetype charged with meanings—orientation, desire, transcendence, celebration—is presented here stripped of symbolic solemnity in order to activate an open and sensory reading. Its monumental scale and inflatable nature introduce a fertile tension between lightness and monumentality, between the ephemeral and the persistence of visual memory. Kiessling works with volume and air as his main materials and turns the space into a living organism that breathes and expands before the viewer’s gaze.
The installation engages directly with the architecture of the Hall of Mirrors, a historic space marked by reflection, symmetry, and representation. In this context, the star acts as both a foreign body and a surprisingly harmonious presence, altering the usual perception of the space and inviting a new way of inhabiting it. The reflections multiply the form, fragment it, and expand it into a constellation of presences that dissolve the boundaries between object and environment.
Kiessling’s work, which evokes childhood, introduces a playful dimension that does not renounce complexity. The inflatable nature of the piece creates an immediate relationship with the viewer and appeals to a bodily and emotional memory linked to play, celebration, and surprise. This apparent lightness becomes, however, a critical tool: art as a space of displacement, capable of disrupting expectations and opening cracks of perception in strongly codified contexts.
Thus, Dominic Kiessling’s star becomes a poetic gesture that suspends time and transforms the visit into experience. Between air and light, reflection and volume, the installation invites us to recover an attentive and receptive gaze and reminds us that sometimes it is in formal simplicity that art finds its deepest capacity to move us and activate shared imagination.