Tracing the Hollow #C

Tracing the Hollow is a digital triptych built around something almost too small to exist: a pigment fragment, well under a millimetre, removed from Edgar Degas' Dancers Practicing in the Foyer, a canvas the painter reworked for close to thirty years and loaded with as many as fourteen layers of paint.

The first panel photographs that fragment through a microscope, in artificial light, simulating glass-plate photography with a CCD sensor: an image of an object Degas himself never saw.

The second, White Layer, answers it with fourteen digital strata, one for each layer of the painting, white on white, after Derrida's white mythology, the figure erased into its own ground.

The third resolves a moth into a Delaunay triangulation, the living form reduced to mesh and vertex.

Made by Kasper Bergholt, a Copenhagen-based artist, photographer, and poet whose recent series interpret time, flowers, and artificiality, the triptych was first shown at The Doughnut (W)Hole pavilion, London, as part of The Wrong Biennale 2025–26.