Dosis Sola Facit Venenum (2025)

Dia: 110cm

Silvered CRT television, cold-worked glass screen, mirror, gold-painted metal wire, mixed media · 110 cm diameter · Wall-mounted · Unique
Apparatus

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Staring at screens is a near-religious pastime. We sit in silence, unmoving, consuming the sermon.

Dosis Sola Facit Venenum takes its title from an adage attributed to Paracelsus — the 16th century Swiss physician and alchemist — who observed that the dose alone makes the poison. Not the substance. 

The work is constructed around an appropriated and altered CRT television screen, silvered and cold-worked by hand. A star pattern cut into the glass surface, radiates from a central sphere. It sits within a monstrance: the sacred vessel used in the Catholic Church to display the consecrated Host for veneration. The term comes from the Latin monstrare — to show. A starburst of gold-painted metal wire and segmented mirrors with decorative cuts surrounds the screen, made from materials salvaged in and around the studio.

The screen does not broadcast. It reflects. The mirror fragments catch the room, the light, the person standing before it. You are the star of this show!

The cold-worked surface makes this explicit — this is not an appropriated object left untouched. The hand is present. The cuts and patterns are evidence of making, of time, of intention. It is a relic constructed from the detritus of the present.

Dosis Sola Facit Venenum was first exhibited at the Pretoria Art Museum as part of Artefacts, a collaborative exhibition with Caitlin Greenberg (July – August 2025), and reviewed in Image & Text, No. 39, 2025 — Journal of the School of Arts, University of Pretoria.

The work is available. Unique piece. Custom crating required — enquiries welcome (lothar@lotharbottcher.com).