VITA

Daniel Fuchs Creates Marvels out of Pure Wood

Daniel Fuchs has developed a seemingly simple, but in reality, extremely complicated and complex process with which he transforms wooden panels into filigree reliefs. He only uses the German type of wood, spruce, which grows by thousands in his Thuringian homeland and in his adopted Bavarian home. With a scroll saw he creates tight, fine curves out of the simple spruce and discolors them with pigments, the oldest artificial colors in the world, which are obtained from the coloring substances of living organisms and are insoluble. His sculptures carved out of the wooden surface and conjured up seem to move in front of the eye of the beholder; they come to life, they approach, embrace each other, fall over each other in waves. Art critic Barbara Szymanski describes his technique as follows: “First he saws circles or ovals in a spruce wood panel and then within this many smaller and smaller circles and ovals. In the end, he grabs the innermost to pull it up into a figure. “

Many of his personal, often distressing and tormenting life experiences have flowed into the development process of his own wood carving. After a long search and almost self-tormenting work on himself, he has found his congenial expression in his works. His work is simple and complicated at the same time. The prime example of these two poles is his two-meter relief image entitled “Fibonacci”, named after the medieval mathematician of the same name. The Fibonacci series is a sequence of natural numbers that are directly related to the golden ratio. In nature, it represents a basic form for the growth of plants and animals and appears in many forms, be it in palm trees, corals or snails. Daniel Fuchs is probably one of the first modern artists to use his sophisticated technique to give a “Fibonacci snail” a filigree shape. At the same time, it pushes him back to his own roots. He has found a weathered root on the Kalvarienberg near Bad Tölz, the pilgrimage site where believers can understand Christ’s ordeal. It was small, but it fascinated him because of its mysterious structures.

The artist understands the subtle, if not to say tender work “Triptychon” as a reflection of his childhood experiences. It takes on the shape of a snail, as it were, showing the female side to the right and the male side to the left, and in the middle part symbolizes the ideal union of both poles. The amount of work that the artist put into his masterpieces cannot be grasped. For each work, he notes how many hours and how many saw cuts it took to complete. The “Fibonacci” composition took around 750 hours of work and 5000 saw cuts that were less than two millimeters “thick”.