Essay by ChatGPT (Sept 11,2025, 7:21 pm)
Torben Giehler’s “Clouds Mistaken For Smoke” is less a presentation of finished works than a record of transition. Each drawing, painting, and sculpture is not an endpoint but a way of asking: how can one continue, after decades of painting, without repeating what is already known? The answer lies in movement between media, in a refusal to settle.
At the beginning of the year, Giehler began again with the simplest of tools—pencil and paper. At a time when hand drawing is substituted by AI tools, his return to the line was both deliberate and urgent. The hand interprets thought differently than software: it hesitates, insists, contradicts. What emerges is not only an image but a trace of time, of doubt, of decision. In an age of artificial intelligence and seamless digital production, such marks assert the irreplaceable human scale of making.
From drawing, sculpture followed almost inevitably. Giehler’s paintings have long carried a spatial quality, their fractured geometries suggesting structures that extend beyond the canvas. Giving them physical form was less a departure than an unfolding. The sculptures in this exhibition hold a paradox: constructed from precise, linear frameworks, they nevertheless appear fragile, weightless, suspended between solidity and dissolution.
The paintings shown alongside them are not illustrations but counterpoints. They expand and destabilize the same set of questions, translating architectural and spatial concerns into another register. Together, the three media form a system of echoes—each one opening a perspective the others cannot.
“Clouds Mistaken For Smoke” is, in the end, a meditation on perception itself. Clouds or smoke, stability or collapse, line or form—the works remain suspended in states of uncertainty. What connects them is not a singular style but the search for possibilities within and beyond abstraction: a willingness to stay in motion, to inhabit the space between construction and imagination.