Multi-layered

Appearance

The art of Axel Möckel shows many sides. He works with different means of artistic expression, ranging from painting, sculp-tures, graphics, installations, music, video to computer animation.

Not only that he arranges in his oil on canvas the layers in a very subtle way, he also "exports" them in other formats to his graphics or computer animations. Similar structural patterns can be found also in the order of how he is combining the sounds of his musical composition in data-banks.

"One has to learn and to master the tools, regardless, one will need them or not." (Axel Möckel)

Parallel to his paintings and drawings he works with video, computer-animated image-processing and music. He analyses the media down to very basic elements, to short forms, to abbreviations or better to a canon of signs, that allows construction and reconstruction compared with a meditative mood and intellectual strength. When he works he is usually never working on just one painting or one animation or one musical composition, but is doing all things parallel, adding a layer here, changing a parameter there or restructuring the speed or masks of a sequence.

"The most essential for me is the consolidation of the reduced pure means in a mutual and by the participation of the viewer to an higher raised symbiosis. This is even more important, because the expenditure, while one works with image-machines and new technologies, reaches often the limits of realisation and the question of a most possible concentration (in the sense of the micro-chip) should come up." (Axel Möckel)

Working with cheap technical equipment (Atari-computer, pinwriters, custom synthesizers and affordable video technique) he stretches the possibilities of low end technique to a far end. Another proof that artistic quality is not necessarily depending on high quantity computing or big machinery, but on ideas of using the limits and limitations of the existing means.

His working process is usually slow and very sytematically. The craft is a very important approach to art for him. As he paints one layer on top of the other, calculating the effects and the appearance of the colours, he targets the same in his music and media work.

Another relevant point to get an access to his work comes from abbreviations, from pictorial short forms, reductions of the visible elements to pure forms, to readable signs, like letters in pictorial writing. In painting, music, graphic and computer animation it is an evident aim to see: the search for a language that explores the inherent media potentials. "He makes us recognise different perception processes and their significance in the face of a reality impregnated with media." (Peter Funken)

The contributions of the artist are not so much spectacular - unlike so much that today is in-creasingly approaching a "society of spectacle" (Guy Debord) - but rather space-creating through a process of approach and reflection.

For when the system and its methods are no longer in the forefront, when the asking of onto-logical questions again plays a role in determining how we deal with the world, art too, is "beyond machines" (Vilem Flusser)

The way he uses the techniques is in the end one possibility to define new pictorial concepts and languages, to reveal the metamorphic qualities of pictures with a stock of signs, that oscillate in a mobile manner to appear into other context again.

It is not easy to get an overview about the work of Axel Möckel, but nevertheless there is a lot to discover.

Save as sequence

(Heiko Daxl, June 1995)

Videos by Axel Möckel:

Eating Pictures

1987, 24:00

Schnudel

1989/90, 5:46

Computer animated abstract narration

Many to One

1990, 3:20

A story developed in a space of machine generated sequences

Hallo

1991, 8:35

Reflections about eternity and pure form

Who is Du ?

1992, 2:30

Light, form, colour, motion, rhythm ...

Lichtleiter

1993, 6:30

Gegenstand

1993, 8:00