Against the Silent World

I refuse to accept visible reality as the final reality.

As a child, perhaps six years old, I sometimes had the idea that everything around me was a dream – not merely individual events, but life as a whole: the people, the things, the spaces and the time through which we move.

That idea has remained with me. It is not a belief. It is an unease from which my painting emerges.

I paint out of the suspicion that reality extends deeper than its visible surface.

Why does what belongs together appear separate?

Perhaps matter, energy, space and time are not ultimately separate. Perhaps they appear to us as different realities only because we exist within them.

We cannot take up a position outside our universe. Our existence and our perception remain bound to space and time. We therefore experience reality only from one place, from one perspective and at one particular moment.

We experience what belongs together as separate because we can never view the whole from the outside.

Perhaps it is not reality that is divided, but our access to it.

We see bodies in space. We experience change in time. We distinguish between what endures and what acts. We call one matter and the other energy. Yet perhaps these are merely different manifestations of a relationship that we are unable to perceive as a whole.

Perhaps separation is not the opposite of unity, but the form in which unity appears to us.

Painting Resists Separation

A painting begins as a surface.

On this surface, figures and spaces between them emerge, near and far, light and darkness, bodies and movement. What at first lies side by side becomes connected to form a world.

The surface remains a surface and yet opens into space. The painting reveals its construction while at the same time creating illusion. We know that we are looking at forms and colours, and yet we experience bodies, gazes, spaces and events.

For me, the illusion of space is not merely a deception. It is the moment in which the visible surface produces a reality that is not materially present and yet is experienced as present.

For me, this is where the mystery of painting lies.

Painting does not simply depict reality. It repeats the process through which reality itself might come into appearance:

The image is matter beginning to dream.

In the image, succession becomes simultaneity

We live in time and therefore experience the world in succession. One moment displaces the previous one. One view follows another. Memory, present and expectation remain separate from one another.

The image can break through this order. On a single surface, different moments, perspectives and realities can appear simultaneously. Outer and inner worlds, memory and present, observation and imagination can overlap.

Painting does not abolish time. But for a moment, it can transform succession into simultaneity.

Comics and Cubism Are Language, Not Content

For me, this is the significance of comic-cubist and cubist means. They are not the content of my art. They are a language through which the limitation of a single viewpoint and a single moment can be overcome.

Comics give me the freedom of transformation, compression and exaggeration. Cubism allows me to interweave different views and different realities. The increasing illusion of space gives these constructed forms body and presence.

Portraiture is not bound to the human face

I paint portraits. Yet for me, portraiture is not limited to the depiction of a human being.

A quince, too, can possess individuality. An animal can become a presence we encounter. An object can carry memory. A group can embody a social condition. A demonstration can appear as a collective organism. Freedom can take on form.

I do not paint only what something looks like. I am interested in the presence it develops.

In an individual portrait, this presence condenses into a being. In a group portrait, it arises between the figures. The soul of a constellation belongs to no single individual. It reveals itself in gazes, gestures, distances, roles, conflicts and shared movements.

Works such as “Café Künstlerbrot”, “Die Demo” or “Liberty” are therefore portraits of a society, a situation or an idea at work.

What we encounter need not be a single being. An entire image can stand before us as a presence.

From Object to Encounter

An object is something we recognise, classify or use. What confronts us as a presence eludes our complete control. It possesses a presence of its own and acts back upon us.

Martin Buber found a distinction for a related experience in the relation between I–It and I–Thou. I do not understand this as a philosophical programme, but as something close to what happens in the process of painting:

Encounter arises where looking becomes meeting – and that is precisely the moment I paint.

Through my painting, I do not simply add a soul to things.
Instead, through painterly means, I ask whether there is already a hidden agency at work within them.

I Do Not Paint an Answer

I do not know whether the visible world is the expression of a deeper, creative consciousness.

I do not know whether matter, energy, space and time emerge from a common origin.

I do not know whether the world we consider real is merely an appearance, accessible to our consciousness, of a more encompassing reality.

My painting is not intended to illustrate a metaphysical doctrine. It should not pretend to a certainty I do not possess. It is an attempt to encounter the visible world for long enough that its apparent unambiguity begins to fracture.

The image becomes a threshold between external perception and inner reality.