MANUEL STEHLI

At the centre of this involvement is the tension between the materiality of the paint and the painterly possibilities on one hand and the physicality of the matter depicted on the other hand. The people he paint are not consistent wholes, neither on a formal level nor in regard to the sources they are based on: essentially, they are collages of photographic or digitally rendered stock imagery that was made to conform to a specific purpose. While these initial poses and gestures tend to have a stereotypical quality to them, it is through the painting process that a sense of oddity and personality may emerge which contrasts with the interchangeability of the source material. It is this state of limbo between representation and immediacy, between distance and intimacy in regard to the perception of the human body Manuel is interested in.