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Torben Giehler at Leo Koenig by Edward Leffingwell
For his third solo exhibition with Leo Koenig, Torben Giehler presented recent paintings (2004) that offer a broad range of angular, brightly colored, highly articulated forms, the shards and splinters of virtual, multidimensional hyperspace. Composed on computer, they are transferred to the canvas, where the act of their painting becomes empirical, as Giehler proceeds one line or block at a time, each step informed by the step before. The surfaces of these complex, radically vertiginous paintings are built up with transparent and opaque acrylics. They are smoothed by spatula or knife in areas strategically masked by tape, where minute ridges of acrylic paint accumulate in millimetric increments as blocks of color intersect.
Giehler's largest paintings are installed low on the wall. The three largest--from 8 to 12 feet on a side--are so complexly layered that the eye sorts through their structure, plane by plane, before returning to the dominance of the field. They suggest a rendering of the hardwired brain, or of the core of a modernist building witnessed in a moment of free fall, when things go by fast, rushing to a distant moment of implosion. A grid of rhomboid forms, like windows in a high-rise, tilts and careens to the upper right of the 12-foot expanse of Lost Highway, as though rushing away. An angular, elongated wedge of white acrylic extends along the lower expanse of canvas, and running along with it is a band of red that functions as a shadow. A similar band of white appears to bend at the painting's optical center, and another juts up out of the complex field, angles to the left, bends, turns right and bends again slightly before descending. More bands of red thrust the white planes forward. Together they reify a primary plane of painted forms that subtly organizes and maintains the painting's stability, while the rectilinear shapes compose an internal structure of blues, greens, pinks and lavender.
The composition of the 8-by-10-foot JPEG Twister is kaleidoscopically concentric, a breakneck vortex composed of layers and layers of structural information that recedes or collapses into the painting's focal point. The varied planes of Theomania (a reference to Mondrian's De Stijl colleague Theo van Doesberg or to the Cassandra Complex's industrial-sound recording of the same name) appear to fold upward along an intense black diagonal. Ordering the angles and bright patchwork of intense, hot Pop colors, Giehler's dominant blacks orient the eye through the warping of deep space. Traces of pencil remain visible as a nod to the stages of his process, while the painted field itself wraps around the architecture of the stretcher, emphasizing the physicality of painting as object. No illusions there. | ||||||
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