MAI 36 GALERIE, ZURICH - STEFAN THIEL September

STEFAN THIEL

AUTOMATENCASINO

Private view: Friday, October 8, 2010, 7 p.m.
October 9 through November 13, 2010

SEPTEMBER, Charlottenstr. 1, 10969 Berlin

We are pleased to present AUTOMATENCASINO, the first solo exhibition of the Berlin artist Stefan Thiel, at SEPTEMBER. Thiel’s works on paper, produced with enormous stamina and obsessive assiduousness, deal with media translation processes, with representation, production, and projection of images. With AUTOMATENCASINO he picks up on his series of “cut-outs” of recent years based on film stills from different genres and periods. Thiel’s black-and-white works, executed using the scissor-cut technique, combine analogies between the scissor-cut, shadow and light play with the idea of cinema as a kind of modern version of Plato’s hell, in which the empty white cinema screen (or the white sheet of paper) not only functions as a projection surface, but is also a “dream screen” on which the viewer projects inner irrational pictures. Thiel’s scissor-cuts have been inspired by the writings of the French theoretician Jean Louis Baudry, a leading proponent of psychoanalytical film criticism. With the expression “cinematographic dispotive,” Baudry creates a nexus between aspects that had previously been viewed separately, such as cinema technology, cultural traditions of perception, photoimaging processes, social conventions, and psychological kinds of processing.
A dark, remote place of longing where happiness is sought is also the associative leitmotif of Thiel’s current exhibition: the gambling den, in which hundreds of machines transform the darkness into a sea of lights created by luminous images and symbols. But in Thiel’s new drawings on black paper the pictorial space becomes a kind of negative screen – a black cosmos in which colored lines act as rays of light forming interconnected architectures: spider webs, paper streamers, fishnet stockings. While these motifs are associated with happiness, celebration, and eroticism, their ephemeral structure defines the space, area and depth. The lines in Thiel’s drawings functions as the reversal of the scissor-cut – they enclose the areas on the black cardboard that would actually be cut away. The body shapes that appear below the Cubist fishnet stocking patterns are empty spaces or holes in which the dissolution of the suggested pictorial space is announced. They are juxtaposed with lines of colored silhouettes cut using a knife that play through the motif of the net in different variations. AUTOMATENCASINO is also an installation in which Thiel’s most recent works on paper correspond with wall paintings and a confetti sculpture.