Schatten und Farbe

40 x 56.6

Acrylic paint on wood on a wooden frame

2015

Shadows and Colour

In the tension between presence and absence, this work reveals the paradoxical relationship between the documented moment and the painterly intervention. The imprint of a shadow, depicting the artist himself, is fixed onto a wooden board and transformed by the traces of the painterly gesture. The liquid paint – yellow, black and white – is not only a medium of superimposition, but also an active component of the pictorial process, overflowing the photographic motif and merging with it until the boundary between what is retained and what flows away becomes blurred.

The transfer technique, which transfers the photographic image onto the wooden support, preserves the transience of a moment that, in its fixed form, is already beginning to fade. The artist’s shadow, a silent reflection of his self, is no longer a pale mirror image of reality, but is recontextualised through the delicate yet penetrating layers of colour. Yellow flows like light and warmth; black like the darkness that eats away at the image from within, whilst white – in its simplicity and clarity – leaves behind a calm, almost melancholic presence.

The paint flows, like the passage of time, over the captured imprint of the body. In its wake lies the act of becoming and passing away: the layers of paint cause the image to become increasingly dematerialised, deconstructing the original motif until only the empty spaces and the coloured openings remain. What once appeared as a fixed silhouette of the self is, through the act of painting itself, transformed into a state of indeterminacy and fragmentation.

In the interplay between photography and painting, a continuous dialogue emerges between the fixed snapshot and constant change. The flowing paint is not mere decoration, but an active intervention in the perception of self-representation. It does not merely conceal; it transforms: it turns the image into a process, a constantly renewing act of self-perception that moves between the fixed time of photography and the open, process-oriented time of painting.

The silhouette of the shadow is not fully captured. It remains an image of the self in a state of constant flux. The subject of the photograph is the artist himself, and the shadow becomes a metaphor for his own fleeting perception of the self. What flows across the image here in colour is not merely a material substance, but also the intangible nature of identity – that which can no longer be grasped, that which is lost in movement.

In this work, the image is not merely viewed, but actively experienced through the painterly intervention. The artist does not remain merely the subject of the image, but, in his role as a creator of images, becomes part of the work itself through the process of superimposition and transformation. Shadows and colour merge into a new image of presence and absence that unfolds beyond fixed reality – a self-reflexive act that breaks down the divide between the familiar and the foreign, between the visible and the invisible, between the self and the image.