Tim Berresheim
La Grotta della Fenice – Lo Spaventapasseri
October – November 2022
Exhibition Views
From hand axe to computer mouse
Devices, objects, jewelry made of bone and stone – all around 40,000 years old. After all, it is the world’s earliest evidence of mobile art that was discovered in the caves of the Swabian Alps. Interesting! But why does Tim Berresheim talk about caves when you ask him about his latest work? How do ancient artefacts of bone and stone connect with his thoroughly digital works? Berresheim answers with an analogy: “We are still in the digital cave” – this is becoming increasingly clear to him. “This is where we leave our first traces.” With digital tools that are still rather crude, like the hand axes used by people around 40,000 years ago.
He went there himself, into the caves of the alps, scanning them with a laser. Berresheim also took his technical equipment to a medieval crypt. The baroque reliquary chapel of the abbey church and the emperor’s hall of the old monastery in Kornelimünster, a district of Aachen, were also scanned. From these architectural set pieces, Berresheim then put together the scenarios for his current group of works on the computer. Everything was cut up, twisted and pushed together digitally – essential epochs of art, cultural and architectural history condensed into virtual images, which are at times populated by fantastic horror scarecrows.
One immediately believes Berresheim when he describes himself as game- and fun-driven, always on the lookout for novelties to advance his art. In his Aachen studio, he prefers to sit at the computer behind tightly curtained windows. “I just like to be left alone,” notes the artist. The constant progress in the digital world is exciting enough for him: Every day brings new tools, new ways to operate the image differently. “For me, navigating within it is the most adventurous thing – I don’t need the outside world then.”
Dr. Stefanie Stadel, September 2022