In the late eighties, Diet Sayler tries to escape the cold, detached and dismantled visual language of Concrete art. He searches for a way to merge the personal, the subjective with the rational and the objective. He wonders if the geometric imagery he is so familiar with leaves space for irrationality, emotion, history and identity. It does.
He turns to a form that has safely secured its place in modern art: the grid. A square or a rectangle, with proportions chosen by Sayler, determines the format of the grid, that always exists of an uneven number of fields. Subsequently, Sayler intuitively removes parts of the grid, creating the form of his ‘basic element’. The possible variations that this process allows for are endless. Sometimes they are reminiscent of robots, Tetris
blocks, pieces of a Happy Cube puzzle and sometimes they remind you of a fantasy language that is both archaic and futuristic. This recurring basic element is found in his
work ever since: dispersed on large canvases or isolated as a site-specific mural. ….
Because intuition and ratio, the subjective and the objective intertwine in this element, he doesn’t lose interest in its power of expression and it will remain a central motif in his work for decades. …
Judith de Bruijn, August 2020
Aus Katalog Parts Project, Den Haag 2020
