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If I were to wake up tomorrow and suddenly find myself 120 years in the future, what from the "now" that surrounds me today would I want to preserve, carry with me, remember, or smell?
Once, I was walking along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with a friend. From there, you can see the Manhattan skyline stretching into the distance, its skyscrapers rising in a long, structured line. Stone upon stone, we built them and lifted them skyward. He said to me, Imagine what will happen when one day all of this has to disappear. And it will have to disappear.
If I were suddenly to wake up in the year 2146, it would be Stefan Vogel's works that describe the fragility of our time through his own unique visual language.
It is always a construction site; a construction site of life, of our surroundings, of society, of our inner world. A site that continually rebuilds us, destroys what came before, and yet repeatedly recreates itself in familiar patterns.
Within this chaos of construction, Stefan Vogel creates works in which fabrics become stage sets, dust becomes paint, and wires become brushes. The material itself is an invitation to look behind the scenes and embrace the aesthetics of the raw, the exposed form of the
fragile.
At the same time, the vulnerability of the works seems to seek protection behind the scenes. It conceals itself beneath fabrics that at first glance appear light and delicate, yet upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be heavy, almost concrete-like.
Timeless versus apocalyptic.
Brutal versus vulnerable.
The blank canvas already bears rows like the lines of a book, it is something into which one can inscribe oneself. It is not empty but already marked. The canvas has been cut apart and then reassembled. In doing so, it carries a history, an aura that has been erased from view, no longer visible, and yet still present within the space.
Or, as Stefan once described it to me:
"I am a bus stop that accepts boredom and dissolves into it, while at the same time existing inside a moving train. Within that, I am also a potted plant celebrating transience while acknowledging both the horizon and its own limitations, just as, through boredom itself, I become the bus stop."
- Sofia Sominski