| WOLFGANG STEHLE "The Wilderness Inside"
Is man actually able to handle the basic commodities
he invents? Is his house or office the right place for him to be?
Is the administration of a paper war the proper form for debate? „General Aviation“ stands at the centre of the current exhibition. Two sea plane floats lie on the ground. The plane´s body itself is no longer visible. One can surmise it in the vanishing point. Up there under the ceiling, where the strutting meets in perspective reduction. At this point one might remember that, hundreds of years ago, the conquest and the measuring of the new world came together at the same time as the invention of central perspective and the discovery of pictorial space; also, that the vanishing point in the picture requires that the viewer be looking from a specific angle. One might wonder if a particular angle, which at the same time excludes others, is not a limitation. The floats in „General Aviation“ then appear to be like millstones around ones neck. Now at the very latest is the time to discover landscape. As soon as we depart from the connectivity of nature, chose to view it from an outside angle and examine it, we then rediscover it. This aesthetic adoption of nature as a 'landscape' is our replacement for what was 'originally' planned to be one entity. In the gallery's window stands a garden cottage: a black wooden shed with a television lying on its floor. In the „Leafless“ animation sequence, a young maple tree in a pot performs a sort of de- and regeneration process at high speed. Accompanied by a creaking noise, the leaves change colour and contract. It ends up as an ornamental framework for the leaves. After a brief pause, the leaves open up again. Placed in the garden shed, the potted and emblem-like, constrained little tree pulses strangely like an animal, as though blood rather than water were flowing through its capillaries. The wall sculpture „Baumkrone“ (“Crown of a Tree”), where wooden slats are assembled under tension on a tree structure, hangs close to the floor and in close view. The trunk and branches break through a wooden roof overhead. It practically gives the impression that the maple tree has risen out of the ruins of the garden shed; and, even so, the roof remains strangely intact. Branches and twigs carefully lie upon the surfaces. The slats feel their way along the contours. What was violent or catastrophic, has, at a closer glance, calmed down and has playfully and ornamentally taken on the features of a kind of tree house. In the „Curse and Drive“ animation sequence a vehicle approaches from the distance. The truck and driver gain in clarity: an insignificant speck becomes a vehicle taking up the whole space, a figure pulsing with stumbling rhythm. Sometimes a person, sometimes a monster, it gapes at the viewer, whilst the simulated sounds of the engine mutate into the roar of an animal. Fearlessness at the wheel and the illusion of inviolability are what Stehle creates within the context of this exhibition, dealing with the myth of the journey of conquest. A modern land grab, that remains, in its monstrous arrogance, limited by the view behind the wind screen and the video screen. Also on view are the „Fenstern“ (Windows) series: „Sherwood“ a modern lattice window, „Taunus“ an indirect light window, and „Spessart“ a copper coloured peaked rook with a window. On the inside of the back plane there are drawings. Not pictures of interiors or landscapes, but rather the window architecture through which we are looking; self reflective and as though we have not come a step closer. Or have we? The sketched architecture blends in with mismatched pieces of the landscape, as though, like a concave mirror, the window panes have burnt the shadow of the window with the reflection of the landscape onto the back plane.
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