What You Are Looking for Is Not There

There are no great gestures, no posing, no breaching of taboos, no reference to current topics. His images of alienation from reality exist outside of time. They portray mortality and losing one’s grip on reality in pictures that are unspectacular. Pictures in which what the beam of a pocket flashlight makes fleetingly visible only that what you are looking for is not there. Marcel Gähler, born in 1969, only ever suggests. He allows flashes of light to break through the darkness and an even deeper darkness to emerge from the impenetrable blackness of the night.

Sylvia Rüttimann on Marcel Gähler

Marcel Gähler, Untitled, 2007; graphite on paper. Courtesy Gallery Roemerapotheke

There are no great gestures, no posing, no breaching of taboos,
no reference to current topics. His images of alienation from reality
exist outside of time. They portray mortality and losing one’s grip on
reality in pictures that are unspectacular. Pictures in which what the
beam of a pocket flashlight makes fleetingly visible only that what you
are looking for is not there. Marcel Gähler, born in 1969, only ever
suggests. He allows flashes of light to break through the darkness and
an even deeper darkness to emerge from the impenetrable blackness of
the night. Here too, the uncanny derives not from hints of past crimes
or lurking monsters. His painting drives us toward the limits of our
perception. It makes it disconcertingly clear that seeing nothing does
not imply that nothing is there. Gähler understands how to create a
vacuum and then punctuate it with shafts of seeing.

When Marcel
Gähler’s camera flashes in the darkness of night, his photograph
captures a world asleep. His are views of familiar but forgotten
places, often in rain or snow. It might be an allotment with shriveled,
overgrown vegetable foliage, a trace of last summer amid remains of an
improvised greenhouse, the front wall of a house behind a garden shrub,
or a tree-top pointing skywards. Gähler bases oil paintings,
watercolors and spectacularly detailed pencil drawings on these
photographs. The real content of the photograph is highlighted by this
transposition. What a superficial glance might previously have missed
now emerges, subtly reinforced, in his pictures.   

These are
images that lie at the interface between casual snapshot and meaningful
allusion. Thus they create a motif-like state of suspense, open to free
interpretation. They recall lost memories, summon up dream sequences.
The ongoing daily loss of universe comes into view, captured on paper.