… Looking back to the early masters of Suprematism and quasi-geometric abstraction, particularly Malevich and Mondrian, Sayler is one of a number of important European artists whose project has been to bring back aspects of the affective into the somewhat sterile rigours of international Constructivism. He has resolutely sought to distance himself from the geometry-based academic rationalism that dominated Constructivist efforts through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Sayler rejected the simplistic utopianism that identified the early modernist Constructivist project in art with technological and socio-political improvement, but he also set himself against the dominant trend in more recent geometric abstraction (and Minimalism) to idealist philosophical figurings, to the repetitive presentations of objective forms. Employing procedures that deny predictive outcomes, and which allow for subjectivity (in choice of colour, for example), intuition (in deciding the shape of Basic Elements) and chance (in the determining of the configuration of the Basic Elements), Sayler has been at the forefront of a crucial development of Constructivism that admits mind and emotion, and the unpredictable event, into its practice. In his own words: "Principle is form / Colour is freedom / Chance is the moment."

Liberated from certain arbitrary constraints, tactile-geometric abstraction becomes itself precisely expressive of the beautiful uncertainties that are a condition of human freedom. …


Mel Gooding
London, 1998
Monograph "Diet Sayler", 1999