As You Desire Me

As You Desire Me

"Sinful" seeing is a dimly lit place filled with veils and snatched glimpses. Desire lures our eye here, there and everywhere. Eager to be seduced, it wanders over the surfaces of the images. An adventure. We lose ourselves in a labyrinth of welling blossoms, arching and arcing leaves, entangling stipes and tendrils, in feelers and rhizomes; voluptuous, sensual, spellbinding.

An exquisite, powerful, meticulously assembled figurativeness though, bridles the whim to peripatetic (eroticized) fantasy. In accord with the laws of recurrent bifurcation, arabesques line up symmetrically, mirror one another, slip-slide "wrestle with themselves". Seemingly self-sufficient, they form coherent, emblematic designs that "orbit" on a white ground, in nothingness.

The artist as Magister Ludi, the Master of the Game, opens play even as the intertwined figurations' field of activity spills over the margins of the page. It is on the proximate page that the arabesque-clews establish connection. We seek and find the terminal points on the outer reaches of the page and in our minds proceed with the controlled game, rearranging the drawn pages without spoiling the game. We are involved, wholly in the spirit of the illimitable eastern arabesque with no beginning and no end.

It is in this perennial thought process of metamorphosis and regeneration of the living that Miron Schmückle would enlist us - the aspiration "to salvage this mouldering whole".

Text: Silke Radenhausen | English translation: Eric Gradman