VERMILION CONFUSION
For Torsten Schumann, the urban environment is an inexhaustible repository of enigmas and confusions.
With subtle humour and an absurdist’s disposition, the artist captures the fragments of contemporary life in which people, actions and objects momentarily coalesce to form suggestive inner logics of paradox, oddity and interconnection. This is particularly apparent in his current series Vermilion Confusion, China 2020 – 2022, of decontextualised scenes from urban life - presented as formally and conceptually-linked diptychs - intertwine with and amplify both their adjacents and the images that precede and follow them, merging to become a complex, montaged whole in which narrative, plausibility and significance are playfully teased out and short-circuited.
It is precisely by dissolving this boundary between appearance and reality that Schumann creates a photographic imagery that evokes a healthy skepticism towards the medium’s supposed evidentiary functions. Text: Wolfgang Zurborn
With subtle humour and an absurdist’s disposition, the artist captures the fragments of contemporary life in which people, actions and objects momentarily coalesce to form suggestive inner logics of paradox, oddity and interconnection. This is particularly apparent in his current series Vermilion Confusion, China 2020 – 2022, of decontextualised scenes from urban life - presented as formally and conceptually-linked diptychs - intertwine with and amplify both their adjacents and the images that precede and follow them, merging to become a complex, montaged whole in which narrative, plausibility and significance are playfully teased out and short-circuited.
It is precisely by dissolving this boundary between appearance and reality that Schumann creates a photographic imagery that evokes a healthy skepticism towards the medium’s supposed evidentiary functions. Text: Wolfgang Zurborn