The woodcuts here were made between 1993 and 2003. The woodcut block was cut, scraped, sawn, etched, and carved. The Tools: besides the usual flat chisels, a chain saw, flat gouges, flat adz, electric planer, and wood rasps were also used, as were cheese graters and other rasps. These tools were used to roughly remove the layers of wood until layers of varying depth were gouged out; the layers were literally ”peeled away.”

I not only print black on white paper, but also invert the visual idea: white is printed on black-colored paper. The visual effects are clearly different. Because the surfaces are cut from the layers of wood, black printed on white becomes a white, structured form on a black background. In the inverse, the visual effect remains ambivalent: is the shape, now black, on top of a white surface, or are there black gaps lying deep underneath the white?

Just as I cut several layers into the block (in the third series of works, there are up to seven plates), white-colored plates are layered on top of each other, until the end of the process is reached or the paper can no longer absorb the white.

Thanks to the filigreed patterns and the dominant black shapes, the visual results diverge into lightness and heaviness; points of concentration and empty spaces occupy the surface, and linear ”paths” cross it. The amalgamation of horizontal and vertical cuts and the roughly chiseled surfaces resemble a bird’s-eye view of patterns of interlaced streets or destroyed cities.

In the multi-leveled, white, layered prints, the state of the image becomes brighter layer by layer, appearing calmer. Nevertheless, seen from the logic of the artistic, technical process of creation, nothing can be covered up or erased, because the carving, gaps, and gashes added to the wood at the beginning shine through even the brightest white.

Here, the process of layering, the ”storeying,” is retained. The vehemently physical activity performed on the wood is transformed, in the print, into an almost cheerful, calligraphic game between black and white, into tenderness and lightness — as if I wanted to change the used parade ground into a blooming garden.

Andreas Rosenthal