ESTHER STOCKER
Esther Stocker’s artistic practice is directed towards the perceptive nature of the image and space, examining it both in paintings as well as in three-dimensional pieces and installations. Her works, lean and rational, analyse the optical ambiguity underlying geometric matrices, repetitions of the same forms and superimpositions of several patterns. Using simple and minimal tools such as the line, the polygon or simple black and white, Stocker creates visual structures where the elements force the eye into a condition of problematic interpretation or potential spatial ambiguity. The uncertainty, the conflict between several interpretative hypotheses, between two-dimensional forms and perspective views, create in the spectator a state of disorientation and playful amusement. But they also arouse fretfulness, since it is difficult to elude the desire to interpret except by looking elsewhere, closing our eyes or, when possible, touching the works with our hands. Stocker thus demonstrates instrumental limits embedded in the visual means with which we are accustomed to view the world, compelling us to challenge their pregnancy and real effectiveness. Her works, moreover, testify to the ability of the image, and art more generally, to construct worlds that are not there and to create indeterminate, abstract spaces. Places where the eye and the observer can lose the bearings that tie us to normality and lose their way.
