‘Faith Fading’, Joel Eschbach’s first exhibition at Guillaume Daeppen Gallery, employs a visual language Eschbach has elaborated over the past six years; now this vocabulary is put to the service of his ideas. If the technique looks familiar, it is because until recently Eschbach made work under the pseudonym The Umbrella Kid and already exhibited at the gallery under that moniker in 2011. The Umbrella Kid had allowed Eschbach the advantages of anonymity while he developed his autodidactic photographic practice.

This practice is still based upon analogue black and white photography, which the artist now complements with sculptural forms. The photographs are mostly set against raw concrete, which creates a ground against which figures and lines form geometric abstractions as well as figurative forms. There is no digital manipulation involved in his process, but much preparation; shapes are drawn, modelled and constructed, sites located and experiments undertaken before a constellation of elements and the right light conditions bring the image to fruition. The results are spare and stark forms, rich with texture.

Having pared his vocabulary back to its essential elements, Eschbach now uses these forms as vehicles for ideas. The characters, shapes in shadow and drawn lines are enigmatic, but not empty. They are designed to communicate unease and uncertainty. Figures – be they mannequins or models – often facing away from the viewer remain undefined, so they could be anyone, and could indeed implicate the viewer. Different elements of the image can be deciphered as symbols, such as the mathematical sign for eternity, or indeed become symbolic. The bare concrete backdrops evoke the aspirations and the disappointments of Modernist architecture, of the numerous projects carried out in concrete that aimed to transform lives for the better, but ended up building ghettos. And in recent photographic works the artist adds an additional layer of hand-written text, repeated mantras, sometimes quotations, that signal some of his intent. For Eschbach, photographs and sculpture are conduits for concerns about contemporary life, and specifically the loss of social values. “I sow axiology and reap in ashes,” he says. His visual investigation of the origins of values examines the interdependence of notions such as good and evil, polarities that can only be defined in relation to each other.

Another of Eschbach’s concerns is the increased infantilization of individuals as elucidated by Markus Metz and Georg Seesslen in their recent book Blödmaschinen: Die Fabrikation der Stupidität (Idiot Machines: The Fabrication of Stupidity, 2011). The ease of passage through life in a consumer society lulls us into inattention; freedoms and independence are willingly relinquished because audiences are spellbound by marketing and mass media. Rather than active participants, we become passive consumers thanks to the very technologies that are supposed to emancipate us. Thus Eschbach’s works are a call to arms. ‘Faith Fading’ generates a moment to pause and move away from computer screens and flows of digital media. And then to evaluate what else we have, and could lose.