Martin Noël is among those artists to whom, starting in the late eighties, we owe the rediscovery and further development of the woodcut as a genuine medium; and yet, his work cannot be reduced to woodcuts alone. Noël has dedicated himself to seeing processes. Works by the artist show forcefully encoded signs, forms and marks first collected as photographs or sketches on his extensive travels, only to be reprocessed, reduced further, condensed in their sign character. Their positioning in the pictorial space tends to evoke the compositional principles of traditional Japanese woodcuts. The woodcut, with the resistence the brittle material offers, poses a considerable challenge to the draftsman Noël. It was his lengthy exposure to wooden printing plates that first made him aware of their plastic qualities. For a few years now, the artist has been considering the original starting point for paper prints as his real medium, endowing it with object character by further processing it. Exhibition Schedule: Museum Liner Appenzell March 29 - June 29, 2003