Playing with food is one of his childhood memories. The pleasure of peeling a piece of fruit was often more exhilarating than that of eating it. When you peel a fruit in one go, you think you know its shape and what its skin’s final silhouette will be after it has been separated from the flesh. Yet the result is always surprising to see. These observations led him to base his work on the concept of “skin” as an autonomous plastic element.
What interests Andreas Schlageter in the concept of “skin” is its plasticity, its role as a boundary between inner and outer worlds, but also its role as a reflector and marker of time.
Pine has a highly expressive bark and a very marked relief, this is what led him to create a particularly large cast using a flexible material. This tree “skin” is the starting point for many of his works: it is their aesthetic and conceptual matrix, the centre of the artist’s research territory.
Texture
He prefers to work on handmade paper from Asia. He uses Japanese, Korean or Thai paper jointly by means of a mixed technique. It is a very sensuous and resistant, highly flexible material, something that enables him to produce featherweight sculptures. His sculptures are bodies that are exposed to the light, to the ambient humidity, they tremble at the slightest breeze. Depending on the size and characteristics of the paper he pastes into the cast, the print is more or less true to the original.
With a 90° pivot, the pine bark motif ends up horizontal, and through this operation, it is freed from its context. The design of the “tree skin” becomes a texture that looks like it could be endlessly unrolled.
Colour
For him, the question of colour and material is absolutely vital to the staging of the pieces. He makes his works out of coloured materials, and uses colour in various ways. For most of his sculptures, colour is part of the material itself. He tints the paper himself, developing a unique palette for each piece. Then, when conceiving and creating the prints, he uses colour without giving it a figurative or meaningful value. The colours, which mix with the paper’s translucence, are essential elements of these delicate sculptures.
Shape
Andreas Schlageter has very often used the silhouettes of clementine skins as the contour of his pieces. These shapes are very inspiring: they evoke a world.
But for some works he used other objects like dried fish skins, sculptures or even souvenir photos. Thus new forms appeared in the reliefs: cartwheels, elements of a face.
Opening them up is like opening a book: a face can be read in a whole new way, and images become visible in a much different way than before.
Narrative
Some of his works have a stronger narrative dimension than others. They are based on, or inspired by, a memory, a photographic portrait of a member of his family. Andreas Schlageter has taken inspiration from a photo of his mother when she was young. The works that stem from these inspirations are made up of one or several figurative motifs: a head, a face, a hand, a cart, etc. He uses photos of people from his family not because of their personality, but for the archetypes that these people embody. The face of one of his daughters aged one is made unrecognisable; but in their fragmented state, her features persist in representing a full face. A paper head, once peeled, looks like a geographical map, an island with jagged contours. The interruptions in the contour of its silhouette are like memory gaps,the echo of a bygone time, where memory and oblivion stand side-by-side.
