Fengel Martin

Beauty permeates Martin Fengel's photographs. Without really being able to pin down where it exactly lies, and knowing that in an age where we can no longer call on the classical concepts of the beautiful to talk of beauty is like walking on thin ice, it still seems to me to represent one essential feature of his pictures. Their beauty is unmistakably before me, bar any stylization or exaggeration: simple, almost subdued, and as a matter of course. Unlike other visually seductive works by artists of his generation, FengelŒs aesthetic is not refracted by the metalevel of a theory of perception, by technical manipulation or by references to the artificiality of our modern ways of seeing. Quite the contrary, Fengel photographs what he sees, simply as it appears, be this the urban civilization around him or the wolrd of nature.