Hasn’t everyone at one time tried to peel a fruit, be it an apple or an orange, in one whole piece? And hasn’t the spiraled peel been used for numerous experiments thanks to its form as well as its durability and texture?

Otmar Sattel is an artist who uses everyday things, be they organic or otherwise, as his material and artistic means, combining them in dynamic compositions full of tension. In his series Broken Orange Flower, Sattel arranges an orange peel on a shard of glass and illuminates it with different color filters. The slightly hardened whole peels, their exteriors glowing red, the interior white, take on a number of playful positions.

Seen as a series one might have the impression that it was a sea breeze that constantly positioned the peels anew. Seen individually, however, it becomes clear that the artist works precisely with light, shape, and color – and particularly with the peel’s reflection on the piece of glass – so as consciously to draw the viewer’s awareness to the essential element of his art: heightened experience of the everyday.

The associations that the works call up, like the legendary water lilies of French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926) for instance, make it evident that Sattel walks a line between painting and sculpture, freed of the rules and bounds of strict genre. Sattel does not view the materials he implements in his art as interchangeable vehicles of shape and color; each has its own quality and substance, which he hopes to show. The delicate and almost dance-like poses in which Sattel arranges his orange peels and captures in his photographs sharpen our understanding of creation and decay in nature and give us numerous new and exciting causes for thought.

Horst Kloever