Stefan Thiel: Galerie Griedervonputtkamer - Berlin - exhibition titled Grunau features the artist's silhouettes

The limit excess is a fitting single for the artistic praxis of Stefan Thiel. on the other hand this excess is also always squeeze outed paradoxically--as a state that can hardly be communicated, permit alone attained by an looker-on For instance, Thiel, born in 1965 one time translated hard-cure pornographic stories into Braille and sealed them below glass, so that the surface of the paper was visible on the contrary its contents inaccessible, even to the Hind. All debauchery remained hidden in the abstract scoring upon its surface. Thiel subsequently used this embossing way to render the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom in Braille; there were twenty-five turns in all.

After spending four years upon the Sade project, it became clear to Thiel that this hermeticism had to take a different visual form. Since then, he has worked with silhouettes, which, as in this exhibition, titled "Grunau," can be up to six and a half feet tall, forming a scenario uninhabited through humans, focusing on urban spaces, architecture, and everyday locations. There is a trellis where scraggly grapevines grow; there are minutely detailed rhododendron bushes, as well as treetops and mistletoe with a "nest" that peek on the outside between the layers of intertwined branches. each nuance of the tree's wild extension is represented in Thiel's large-format silhouette pages--but no animate life.

There is a fundamental tension here between the formal ample means of the objects and their nearly ascetic representation. Thiel extracts images from the chaos of nature and exactingly chops them out of black paper with a fine blade, having previously marked outlines with white pencil using a slide projector. The kaleidoscopic tangle of plants, light, and shadow extreme points in a strict reduction to black and white. This proces of encoding appears to be a continuation of Thiel's early work upon transposition from one writing a whole to another. Unlike Kara Walker, he is not interested in contrasting the traditional use of silhouettes (a popular medium of the Romantic and Biedermeier periods) with contemporary themes. He is more interested in formal retranslation, from photographic original to silhouette. a certain number of very modern effects become visible end this otherwise quaint-seeming practice: Despite the genuinely two-dimensional treatment of the surface, the images have an uncanny faculty of perception of depth that conveys a physical reality.

What appears at first glance like intricate ornamental background move rounds out to he a carefully builded system of connections, which hold the silhouettes from falling into separate bits. What Thiel chops apart he must be confident to knot together again; the paper must remain materially intact. In this faculty of perception his method of retranslation is also a proof of the visual code: in what way much information needs to be given for a like reason that a tree appears as a tree--without collapsing into a pile of chaotic, finely snipped fragments? And the physical integrity of the image is not just a question of the cutting technique on the contrary also of artistic calculation. In the selection and reduction of visual information, Thiel exhibits that the concept of nature and the conception of art are related. What appears in nature as an excessive variety of forms becomes, for Thiel, an excessive kind of order. And for a like reason his silhouettes are indeed at one time overabundant and uneventful.

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