Film: RICHARD DEACON

As part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Galerie Thomas Schulte will present new works by Juan Uslé, paralleled in the Corner Space by a window piece by Richard Deacon. The window drawing is a continuation of Deacon’s wall drawings, created in the past decade, of which many were specifically designed and executed for Galerie Thomas Schulte. Twenty five years after incerting drawings into the window frames at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Deacon returns to the subjet by realizing drawings on glass with his work Film.

On the three panes of the display windows of the gallery’s nine meter high Corner Space, Richard Deacon has drawn a grid of closed horizontal and vertical lines with liquid chalk markers in a band, parted by the window frames. The whole work consists of three sequences, colour combination and patterns, forming an array of abstract images. Caught in the linear web, curves delineate a larger spatial body, tapering in the middle and expanding beyond the boundaries of the strip at either end. Film not only refers to the purely formal appearance of film strip, but to cinema, an event which unfolds in time. Materially a film is a thin layer – the intermediate zone separating two environments from each other.

Aspects of superimposition and crossfading, which are also elementary themes in Deacon’s sculptures, especially come to light in his window piece. The work, which constitutes a transparent layer between inside and outside, exists as a membrane between the empty interior of the gallery and the public, open space of the city. From the inside of the gallery, looking at the image, the viewer gazes through the drawing onto the outer world, thus being in front of and within the image.