Esther Stocker

21.01.–19.03.2005

Most of Esther Stocker's paintings have a grid pattern; they seem like a chess board, where the artist tries her various moves. At first sight, everything seems to be clear: geometrical pattern in black and white mainly, and sometimes with nuances of colours. The clarity quite soon blurs, when the mostly subtle interferences come in our field of vision. Suddenly there are alternative ways of seeing - the clear and obvious becomes fragile and fleeting, the simple does not turn into something complex, it is us who start to doubt about existence of "the simple" as such. When some of the rectangles comprising the grid pattern are displaced, the effect of this pattern in Stocker's paintings seems to contradict intuition: it is no more a network containing points of reference, but it rather seems to prevent us from grasping the other pattern which is formed by slight irregularities. The artist seems to exploit the ostensible robustness of geometrical forms in order to dismantle that robustness completely. It is not a complex world, it is the way we see the simplest structures which makes us doubt about everything.
(Martin Prinzhorn - „Der Schein der Klarheit“, Parnass Kunstmagazin, issue 4/2004, page 128 - 132)