Because It's There:
Stefan Sehler

March 8th - April 8th, 2012

Speaking in Artforum about the artist’s previous exhibition at the gallery, Donald Kuspit suggested that Sehler’s paintings “demonstrate that modernist painting is not necessarily dead – it still has some tricks up its sleeve – and show that a quasi-photorealistic picture can have a [striking] message”. The operative phrase here is “not necessarily dead”, since Sehler toys with modernist premises like a cat with a mouse, returning to poke and prod them until he extracts some further “tricks” (and ironies). On the other hand, as a result of his repeatedly obsessive and analytic dissections, there are moments of revelation when it seems beyond any doubt that the artist has indeed also stepped onto another plane, certainly finding himself striding out into previously unchartered territory. For over a decade now, Sehler’s Trojan Horse has been his reverse glass technique under Plexiglas, which has given him the extraordinary ability to deal quite blatantly with the materiality and matter of paint, while at the same time enormously accentuating its potency, by denying the spectator access to it. The works that Kuspit was referring to appeared on initial casual observation to be photographic images which then revealed themselves to host chaotic random abstraction within the contours of the representational motif. In Sehler’s newest works, that initial spectator’s view might identify minimalist, modernist abstraction that therefore should have a whole contrasting set of parameters to the artist’s previous work. Strangely this is far from the case, since the new works essentially rely on the same preoccupations, with nothing that makes these strange abstract surfaces ultimately any less representational than the previous foliage or mountain paintings. Indeed, a number of the new paintings are reminiscent of photographs of the moon’s surface, allowing the work to ease itself into the intriguing position of seeming even more photorealist than the previous works, while at the same time being far more abstract.