Marcel Gahler - The Night Is Never As Dark As It Is In Childhood

Marcel Gähler works with small-format, black-and-white photographs that he has copied in pencil in their original size. Here the illustrative process has become even more complex, with the photographs projected onto a sheet fixed to the wall, and then used as the basis for Gähler’s obsessively meticulous miniatures. In this way the images acquire a certain remoteness, loaded with layered meaning. The personal subjects of the original photos – scenes of family life, children sleeping or playing, outings to the beach and celebrations – are dramatized in a hazy, pencil-grey rendering of distant memory. A thoughtful essay by Peter Stamm expands on this perception.