Georg Tholen

Catalogue „Stephan Reusse 1996“, book: „Stephan Reusse 2003 –1983“

Momentary Shapes – About the Inconsistency of Time

The place of body dissolves. Its supposed strength and permanence digresses today into non-material and virtual shapes that are seemingly as eerie as those digitally combined photos, which are no longer able or willing to give us proof of a material directness.

But the scepticism of contemporary diagnoses about the disappearance of reality does not only include a melancholic aspect, but also today~s insight that the classical symptoms of photographic accuracy toward objects are deceptive. This in turn gives rise to diverse perspectives and visible things as such are questionned and re-arranged.

Today the blurred lines of the object are due to the art of dissolving which should not be equated with the development of digital technology, but would hardly be possible without their experimental frankness. This new art represents the loss of rigid boundaries: of the outside and inside, of a (lived) past and (simulated) future. The rip in the time fabric creates a new status of the photos. Regardless of whether they are put together in a photo-realistic, photo-poetic or digitally way, or whether they question these differences in the genre themselves – their pictorial composition shows that photos are no simple copies of a past moment, but quarrelling pre-pictures and post-pictures of a moment that only proves to be as a decisive event later.

In this way, the loss of a shape (myself) which is strengthened and standardized by developed patterns means a tentative, nomadic frankness for the indications of things that could be dilferent. We are not lost in the state of uncertainty in these vanishing-lines, but gain a sense for new horizons. A sense that is oscillating around temporary- intervals. This, if you like, non-decisive and non-available key element records moments of shock and trauma. Starting from this, we make up stories, fairy-tales and metaphors of transition: fugitive figures of an always unsatisfied curiosity.

Georg Christoph Tholen, Kassel. l9.8.1996