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11/10/2006

Torsten Warmuth

Galerie Mamia Bretesche', Paris

In the series "Night Gatherers", the artist uses analogous photography's wide range of technical variation in order to give his images - simultaneously - a super-temporal and ultimately un-datable atmosphere and style. Particularly characteristic of his work is a blurring of motion, produced by long exposure times, but the artist also frequently uses multiple exposures of a negative, sandwich-projections and negative-collages.

He carries the principle of the instantaneous shot - suggested by the extreme motion and dynamics of the motifs - ad absurdum. His images of urban life, his observation of anonymous or occasionally named passers-by, are transformed into the protocol of encounters that never took place in real space. These are not the "decisive moments" described by Henri Cartier-Bresson, nor are they the systematic expeditions of a photographer like Beat Streuli, who isolated individuals from a crowd in his anonymous portraits. Torsten Warmuth's images continue to weave passing impressions of the everyday and so create daydreams. Like homage to an age not yet enslaved to speed, Warmuth consciously employs something that the pioneers of photography viewed as a problem or a technical accident and sought to overcome - the imbalance between movement and exposure time. He himself becomes a kind of "Night Gatherer".

One of the most mysterious pictures among his latest works is the portrait of an old man reading; a photograph recalling the face of Janus, oscillating between lively activity and the slumber of death. In this image, the figure has an inherent metaphorical existence. The photograph is submerged in the sense of a loneliness grown old and an awareness of transience. At the same time, it raises questions as to those emotions that may have emerged during the interaction between the photographer and this stranger.

Torsten Warmuth's photographs, whose close affinity with Futurism and Photo Dynamism has been described by Enno Kaufhold, and for which Kai Uwe Schierz suggested the extremely fitting literary comparison with the "stream of consciousness", are "images of the imagination" because of the way that they fix fleeting encounters and ideas. At the same time, their unique visual quality means that they strive towards the physical presence of the original object, strive to come close to the physical and psychological moments at which the photographs were taken. This appears paradoxical, and yet the same striving for proximity emerges once again in the laboratory. It is as if the objects and people represented were being translated into another language and so transposed into a parallel world.

Sabine Maria Schmidt

1 Quote from: Die Wahrheit der Photographie. Klassische Bekenntnisse zu einer neuen Kunst, ed. by Wilfried Wiegand, Frankfurt am Main 1981, p.

Private view: Thurs, 12 October 7pm

Galerie Mamia Bretesche'
48, rue Chapon - Paris

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