Richard Schuetz

“The future of I give is you take” describes an apparently absurd assertion, which is based on a verbal misunderstanding, but implies a confusingly disparate deeper sense. The incidental misinterpretation leads abruptly to the cynical realisation of a possessive posture. Richard Schütz’s photographic and cinematic scenes often present situations, which have a chaotic, as well as functional effect. Their absurdity is expressed by the fragile character of the represented objects and by the claustrophobic emptiness of the depicted places. The first impression is defined by absence, inscribed in morbid signs of a cheap affluence. His works symbolically visualise the eloquent and disparate appearance of the surface of our self-consuming culture and the degree of its destruction: randomly, but obsessively accumulated objects, whose significance collapses, as their function exhausts itself in a mere representative pretension; unless its assumption of control does not already expose itself as a simulacrum about to desintegrate. Yet, this exhibition also allows the viewer a return to emptiness as a physical place, whose existence seems to be absent-mindedly presented to the eye. Notion understood as absence. Not silent, but speechlessly ceasing. What remains, is to transgress the limits of our cognitive perception by transforming the abstract into an imaginative space. As if you would walk through a mirror, taking with you the arbitrary memories of the world, remembering these as blurred patterns and presaging that the backside of the mirror will be blind. No light will refract, no spectrum seduces the senses unfold. But no image without deceit. Without image there is no self and without self there is no recognition of the delusiveness in the symbolic barter.