Tuesday, May 17, 2005



Calvino meets Gilliam in the bleak and beautiful world of Berlin-based painter Stefan Hoenerloh.

One recognizes the architectures Stefan Hoenerloh puts on canvas, in multiple layers of transparent coatings. And yet one is misled. The buildings, patinated by time, may convince by their detailed correctness in every corner and cornice, but they are not real. Hoenerloh isn't a tourist in Venice, Marseilles or Salamanca who has exchanged the camera for a brush. Even though the oblique lines in the paintings may, at first, suggest a photographic viewpoint, or that we are confronted with photographs or paintings after photographs. His painted buildings are pure fiction. They stand nowhere outside his paintings. And that is why they can speak of more than real architecture is able to, that is why they stand everywhere.

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