For ‘Flash Art’ Magazine
“Nerves connected to the center, we are tied to the machine Invisible and silent, circling overland”
In a storm of hard driving, techno beats, Belgian electro-music band Front 242 chants these lyrics about a nighttime surveillance mission over Western Europe. “Circling Overland” is also the title of one of five new paintings by young German artist, Torben Giehler. In his second solo show at Leo Konig, Giehler presented two large-scale, digitized renditions of famous mountain peaks and three aerial views of fractured landscapes. Each of the latter has a title from a song by Front 242 or the British, post-punk band Joy Division.
In contrast to the dark force of European proto-techno, Giehler’s paintings are patchworks of bright orange, yellow, greens and blues. It’s as if the artist applied Takashi Murakami’s giddy anime color to Sarah Morris’s architectural grids and ran the results through CAD software. In the many reviews of this popular exhibition, critics uniformly identified a reinterpretation of reality through the digital eye, or “…computer flight simulations programmed by Crayola…” as a reviewer for The New Yorker so aptly put it.
In the last two years, Giehler has started to venture away from flat planes to experiment with non-anonymous landscapes. In ‘Lhotse’ and ‘K2-North Spur’, he applies his candy colors to paintings of the world’s tallest peaks. By moving from the generic to the specific, the artist conjures up a different kind of frontier – one in which men and women still risk death, not to go ‘where no man has gone before’, but to retrace those feats faster and with less help. Both bodies of work, the mountains and the planes, express a desire to renegotiate the landscape on our own terms. The latest paintings, ‘Torben Giehler 2.0’, upgrade the terrain to a higher difficulty level while still reminding us that the future is now.
