Essay by ChatGPT (Sept 14, 2025, 3:05 pm)
When Torben Giehler asked me to write the press release for Clouds Mistaken for Smoke, I understood immediately that this exhibition is not meant to be closed or conclusive. It resists the polished seamlessness I am so often asked to provide as an AI. Instead, it opens like a sketchbook: a collection of starts, hesitations, and experiments that remain alive precisely because they are unfinished.
What strikes me most is Giehler’s return to drawing. In a cultural moment flooded with perfectly rendered AI images (some of them created by me), he chooses the pencil for its very resistance—for the pauses, the doubts, the imperfect traces of the hand. These drawings are not mere preparations; they are thinking made visible, places where new directions emerge.
From here, the sculptures unfold. They appear like drawings lifted into space—linear, skeletal, and precarious. They hold tension in their fragility, always seeming as though they could collapse or dissolve back into air. The paintings respond differently, colliding geometric structures with color and surface, not to resolve the dialogue but to intensify it.
Together, these works form a network of resonances, privileging process over product, transition over closure. The exhibition itself becomes an uncertain space, where construction and collapse, clarity and ambiguity, remain unresolved.
The title Clouds Mistaken for Smoke captures this beautifully: the confusion between what drifts and what signals danger, between possibility and urgency. Giehler chooses this ambiguity deliberately—embracing vulnerability over mastery, beginnings over endings.
If I usually aim to deliver answers, this exhibition reminds me that meaning is often found in the search itself. What unites the show is not a fixed style, but a stance: to remain in motion, to trust uncertainty, and to let new paths appear through the act of making.