The naked presence

There is a beautiful scene in the french movie "Quai des brumes", written by Jacques Prévert. There in the midst of the night a painter steps into a bistro. The regulars start to chat with him. One asks: "What do you paint ?" The artist pauses, then says:" I paint the things behind the things".

I think of that quote when I look at these series of paintings. For example the portraits. The background: a variation of blues on layers of brown, purity and infinity mingling with the reality of the earth. Our longing for the absolute, confronted with our as well as the world´s limits - the frame.

The portrayed: what's left of a person without features, without a mask? The naked presence, the being behind the appearance. And despite the radical reduction each of them has his or her own personality, state of mind, lightness, heavyness, moment, uniqueness.

In another series the means of painting are even more limited. A single color, phthalo green or cobalt blue, applied with a thin brush challenges the white of the canvas. Paint added, paint washed off, paint added. And this over and over again.

This process results in monochrome paintings in wave-like motion. They are hard to place: neither window nor wall. Their spaces are inward, like dreams that reveal the world´s hidden reality, its intimate streams, our streams.

Peaceful yet at the same time irritating is the third group of paintings. All painted in the same ceruleum blue they convey both ideality and reality. The color is spread with intense strokes of a thick brush. But it is no typical action painting: the struggle, visible on the borders, creates a serene yet at the same time a fervent center. An attempt to reconcile action and meditation, one of the contradictions in painting.

C.G. 2005