Whatever their initial purpose, these images have changed the American perception of war and the way it is being represented, much as Eddie Adams photograph of police General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a horrified Viet Cong prisoner (see the painting "Viet Cong Prisoner") or Nick Ut's photograph of the naked little Vietnamese girl Kim Phuc running down the road, her clothes burned off by napalm, revealed another aspect of the Viet Nam War to the American public of the late 1960's. These are the images with which Deyab grew up with as a child in era of LIFE Magazine and the photojournalism of 1960's America.

Today the serving up of the visually horrific has become a task of the entertainment industry, not the news media. The US government and the self-censorship of the mainstream media ban images of extreme war violence and dead bodies, even the dead American soldiers in their flag-draped coffins returning home from Iraq. Instead, it is replaced by the artificial violence of the Hollywood film industry and of video games devoid

of any meaning, as well as the "embedded images" of the press, which conceal the horror of real events, rather than revealing them. Reacting to this contradiction, all Deyab's paintings allude to the theme of open or hidden violence, be it traces of war, victims or enemies. The tortured body and halting steps of the figure in "John Merrick" could be caused by genetics or war.

Borrowing some minimalist devices, Deyab translates them into his specific painterly language, except that the figure emerges from the often-monochrome background, referring to their photographic kinship. Whatever images Deyab chooses, they can be described as traumatic and "incapable of resolution or catharsis, taken up the cusp of life and death" (Abigail Solomon-Godeau). The painting "Clockwork (Dog)" is based on the famous rape scene in Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange." In "Falluja (Blue Sky)" the dark, tortured silhouette of the dead American contractor is seen against the blue sky of that day. In portraying this, the artist points to the very core of the contradictions that recently appeared in the American society: what can be shown and what should not be shown. Few issues have provoked more public clamor in the last few years. In his paintings, Deyab focuses on detail, introduces unexpected close-ups, and distorts the composition, imposing on the spectator a reflective distance. Countering official photography's aesthetic method, his reductive palette crystallizes the very quality that is absent in the official photography and artificial in Hollywood cinema: the real horror of events they are failing to represent.

Evoking a long history of the representation of violence, from Franciso Goya's "Disasters of War" to Kubrick to David Lynch's "Elephant Man," Deyab's work points to Susan Sontag whose thoughts on the subject she expressed in her last book "Regarding the Pain of Others." "The image, immaterial in itself, especially when digitally registered, is nonetheless emitted into the real, not virtual world, where it will be encountered by real, not virtual subjectivities."

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Ruedi Bechtler

"A situation of increasing chaos is seen under an overgrowth of herbs": this subtitle of a work from the cycle of photographs CROSSFLOW clues us into the power of nature. Making chaos visible in a wide variety of ways, CROSSFLOW forms the basis of Ruedi Bechtler's investigations into the subject matter and visual potential of order and chaos.

In works like CAN, the motif of chaos is enclosed within clearly defined geometric forms and frameworks, illuminated from behind and casually arranged in the (exhibition) spaces.
Of gentle brilliance, CAN reports on the reality of chaos without any intrusive or accusatory pretensions and enlists constructive principles of order to re-materialize its message.

Bechtler pursues his exuberantly experimental approach to order in such works as SPIEGELUNGEN (Reflections) and ECKLEITER (Corner Ladder). His laboratory-like investigations examine similarities and affinities, identities and differences. He enlarges and diminishes, twists and turns, mirrors and combines things presumed to be fundamentally distinct. The result: new unprecedented relations, a vibrant realignment of borders, and the prospect of reinventing oneself.

Thank you, Mr. Bechtler.

Martina Schall
Translation: Catherine Schelbert