Natalia Stachon

Thinking 4, 2009

“When the fact fails him, he questions his senses / when the fact fails me, I approve my senses.” This line by the British poet Robert Graves provided the starting-point for Natalia Stachon’s sculpture group Thinking. The line “Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance” is engraved on two elements of Thinking 4, the version acquired for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection. The four elements leaning on the wall are held together by a strip of stainless steel, and adopt a sculptural type that has seen many variations in Minimal Art. The succinct and transitive element of the structure is further supported here by the material, which places the object in an intermediate visual zone between appearing and disappearing. In the same way the text cancels itself out in terms of presence and significance in that the words engraved on two sides are superimposed on each other, and thus difficult to decipher.