Tableaux Plas­tique

Daniel von Sturmer start­ed out as a painter and he has nev­er grown tired of test­ing the space between sur­face and illu­sion, between the mate­r­i­al fact of an artwork’s sur­face and the illu­so­ry space that can unfold inside it. …Even at its most aus­tere, the field of per­cep­tion is always fuller, stick­i­er, thick­er than we expect. It’s as if, for von Sturmer, expec­ta­tion is a qual­i­ty as tan­gi­ble as any of the oth­er real objects he manipulates.…

…Every­thing is out in the light and open-hand­ed. Noth­ing much hap­pens, and it turns out to be more than enough. We are so hard-wired to expect events to play out in a cer­tain way in film that we’re always men­tal­ly plung­ing ahead to the out­come, and always dis­ap­point­ed when the expect­ed thing even­tu­al­ly arrives. Von Sturmer’s videos calm­ly arrest that head­long habit of mind, so that oth­er kinds of move­ment can declare them­selves. Per­haps we can divide artists between those who want to show us what they alone have seen — their visions and dis­cov­er­ies, their jour­neys to the hid­den heart of things — and those like von Sturmer who want to show us how we see.

Justin Paton, ​‘Away From Their Names’ in Venice Bien­nale 2007: Susan Nor­rie, Daniel von Sturmer, Cal­lum Mor­ton, exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue, Aus­tralia Coun­cil for the Arts in Asso­ci­a­tion with the Miegun­yah Press, 2007