Welcome to the jungle

Thomas Scheibitz tries to find a way through the blizzard of imagery in which we live rather than just add to the storm, writes Aidan Dunne

German artist Thomas Scheibitz presents us an odd disjuncture in the title of his Imma show about 90 elements / TOD IM DSCHUNGEL. The 90 elements, you quickly realise, are the elements that make up the periodic table, the basic building blocks of which, as he says, "everything in the world is made".

TOD IM DSCHUNGEL, on the other hand, seems to indicate something diametrically opposed to the notion of discerning or imposing order, as though our dreams of making sense of the world are doomed to end in failure and death. The jungle is a metaphor for what is impenetrable and irreducibly chaotic. His paintings, sculptures and photographs reflect our desire for theories of how the world works, and the limitations that circumscribe the satisfaction of that desire.

As Scheibitz point out, the number of elements that currently comprise the periodic table is not definitive. It has been and remains subject to revision. "It might be 108 in a few years' time," he notes. In fact it's a necessarily provisional process, which is partly what interests him enough to use it as a title and a subject.

Not that he is engaging in a bit of fashionable science-bashing. He is not against attempts to make sense of things. Rather he is pointing to the phenomenological nature of our world. Rainer Maria Rilke summarised the human predicament as a perpetual attempt to order an encroaching chaos until we ourselves fall apart. And there is something of that spirit in Scheibitz's work, which articulates a process of inventive and perpetual redefinition.

Certainly it resists the idea of the definitive. For any visual artist, part of the chaos of the contemporary is the veritable blizzard of imagery within which we live. His work suggests that Scheibitz is interested in finding a way through the blizzard rather than merely adding to the storm. That is, he feels that as an artist one should have an inherently critical attitude to the visual. Partly for this reason he is very suspicious of figurative imagery, and sceptical about much of the current wave of figurative painting (he rates only a few such painters). Figurative painting, he feels, can too easily register as illustration to the exclusion of other levels of interest. It is too prone to become part of the blizzard.

Scheibitz is tall and strongly built. Easy in manner and casually dressed, he sports a beanie, even in the well-heated precincts of the Royal Hospital. He is growing a beard, an "on-going project" he says with a self-deprecating smile. He seems to be inseparable from his camera, a digital SLR, which he uses as naturally as though it were part of him, and a pouch containing a clutch of small notebooks - the starting point, he says, for absolutely everything he makes. While he is relaxed in manner, he is terrifically enthusiastic and exact - "obsessive," he says - about his work, and keen to explain himself clearly. In fact, he was reluctant to be interviewed because he wasn't sure his English was good enough (it is).

HE WAS BORN in 1968 and brought up in Radeberg, in Saxony, in what was then East Germany. The ideologies of East and West did not impact on his childhood at all and, by the time he came to study painting, "the Wall came down". As he puts it, his family situation "was not exactly typical", in that his father was a monumental stonemason, an occupation safely remote from political interest or significance. His father's occupation certainly makes a lot of sense when you see his own work, which has a tremendous sense of precision, an acute sensitivity to form in two and three dimensions, and a liking for the process of making things.

From his father, he says, he learned a tectonical (in the constructional sense of the term) approach, and he learned about the aesthetics of typography, "the qualities that make the perfect letter". But he was never tempted to become a stone-carver himself, partly because, as he notes pragmatically, the dust and other hazards make it an unhealthy occupation. Instead, before studying art, he did two jobs, both of which are also highly relevant to his artistic work. He was a tool-maker and then a general fixer in a factory - "they brought me everything that was broken". He is still keenly interested in technology and engineering: "A well-designed tool is very like a good sculpture for me." While there is always something about his own work "that cannot be explained exactly", he emphasises that he never begins from a position of pure instinct or emotion. He assembles a great deal of information about a subject that interests him. "I need to find out as much as I can, to know as much as I can, and then, when everything is together, I need instinct to find a point of entry. Because it's never a case that the information and the image form a one-to-one translation."

His sculptures are painted, something that, together with their forms, makes them look as if they are of a piece with the paintings. "We know now that classical sculpture and architecture, which we now regard as very pure and austere, were not only painted, but were painted in the brightest, most kitsch colours," he points out. It seemed natural to paint his own three-dimensional pieces. "I like that you don't know what material the object is made from." As it happens, it is usually wood and MDF (and on occasion card and paper), partly because "it has to be fast". It has to be fast, he explains, because "that means I can show my assistants a design on Monday, and by Friday I can be walking around it in the studio, looking at a three-dimensional form. That is a great luxury, to be able to do that."

A sketch from a notebook is never simply transcribed. "When I set out to make something from a sketch, I have to be in the right frame of mind, but the idea is always reformed a hundred times over. It would be too boring to start at one corner and end in the opposite corner having just recreated a drawing. Even though the idea is there, the process of translating it is still creative. I couldn't just reproduce something, and I couldn't redo a painting. And I don't do a series of something. Every piece is a single piece for me."

HIS SCULPTURES, PAINTINGS, photographs and drawings have the quality of belonging to a common world because they are, in many respects, part of one world. His photographs record sections of his studio, but rather than depicting a space where art is made, they depict something that is more or less a work of art in itself. "I'm lucky enough to be able to have a really big studio," Scheibitz explains. This studio is a former bus garage in Berlin, which is divided in two. One part is a workshop space, the other a kind of vast storeroom. Pieces of work-in-progress are arranged in this latter space "for up to a year". Not only do ideas emerge out of this arrangement, but the whole room is itself a many-faceted installation. Scheibitz says that, while he would not claim to be in the same league as Bancusi (whose recreated studio is now adjacent to the Pompidou Centre in Paris), he has a similar aim in making his studio a work in itself, expressly designed to be photographed.

He doesn't shy away from traditional categories of subject matter. Still life is clearly highly relevant, but so too are landscape and the figure. His architectonic world of spaces, coloured planes, geometric forms, functional looking objects, signs and shapes is precisely defined and draws on myriad sources but, he points out, "I'm happiest when I make something that looks as if it is almost an invention. That is, you know it looks like something but you cannot quite say what that is. I want it to be as clear as possible, but with this open field behind it." This certainly has to do with his suspicion of figurative images. "We are presented with so many," he argues. Moreover, they all have designs on us, they are working on us. Despite which, he feels, they are not subject to the level of critical analysis that they warrant. This is not a case of analysing them in terms of iconographic content, which is a superficial response, and, he implies, the trap much figurative art falls into.

All of which explains why titles are important to him: "I search a long time for titles." If a work simply illustrates its title, it has to be counted as a failure. Rather, he tries to find a certain equivalence between work and title, "so that the title catches the image but does not dictate to it - it is like the sister of the work, they are related but they don't cancel each other out".

In a similar spirit, the world he creates has a quality of otherness while being recognisably related to the everyday place we inhabit. It's a fabricated world that invites exploration and critical appraisal as part of a process that, he hopes, will change the way we look at everything.

about 90 elements / TOD IM DSCHUNGEL by Thomas Scheibitz is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until Jan 27, 01-6129900