01 · Origin

Against the Silent World

I refuse to regard visible reality as the final reality.

When I was a child, perhaps six years old, I sometimes imagined that everything around me was a dream — not merely individual events, but life as a whole: people, things, spaces and the time in which we move.

That idea has remained. It is not a doctrine. It is a restlessness from which my painting emerges.

I paint from the suspicion that reality reaches 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 occupy a viewpoint outside our universe. Our existence and perception remain bound to space and time. We therefore experience reality only from one place, one perspective and one particular moment.

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

Perhaps reality is not divided; perhaps only our access to it is.

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 we cannot perceive as a whole.

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

02 · Painting

Painting Resists Separation

An image begins as a surface.

On that surface, figures and intervals, proximity and distance, light and darkness, bodies and movement emerge. What initially lies side by side joins to form a world.

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

Spatial illusion is not merely deception to me. It is the moment when the visible surface produces a reality that is not materially present and is nevertheless experienced as present.

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

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

Unity becomes multiplicity.
Surface becomes space.
Form becomes body.
Movement becomes time.
Matter becomes appearance.

The image is matter beginning to dream.

In an image, succession becomes simultaneous

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

An image can break this order. On a single surface, different moments, perspectives and realities can appear at once. 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.

03 · Language

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 to a single view and a single moment can be overcome.

Comics give me the freedom of transformation, condensation and exaggeration. Cubism allows me to interlock different views and realities. Increasing spatial illusion gives these constructed forms body and presence.

The sign becomes body.
The surface opens into space.
The figure begins to look back at us.

A portrait is not bound to the human face

I paint portraits. But for me the portrait is not limited to the depiction of a person.

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

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

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

“Café Künstlerbrot”, “Die Demo” and “Liberty” are therefore portraits as well: portraits of a society, a situation or an active idea.

The counterpart need not be a single being. An entire image can confront us.

04 · Encounter

From Object to Encounter

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

Martin Buber found the distinction between I–It and I–Thou for a related experience. I do not understand it as a philosophical programme for my painting, but as something close to what happens in an image: the thing being looked at becomes a counterpart.

I paint the moment when something ceases to be merely an object.

Painting does not simply add a soul to things. It asks whether what we consider mute and motionless might already possess a hidden agency.

Perhaps animation is therefore not a property belonging to a single object. Perhaps it emerges in relationship: between figure and space, between figures within an image, between visible form and inner imagination — and finally between image and viewer.

The counterpart emerges where looking becomes encounter.

I Paint No 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 arise from a common origin.

I do not know whether the world we take to be real is only an appearance, accessible to our consciousness, of a more comprehensive reality.

But I keep these questions open.

My painting is not meant 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 until its apparent unambiguity begins to fracture.

Then a fruit can become a being.
A figure can be body and sign at once.
A group can develop a shared soul.
A painted space can appear more real than the space in which we stand.

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

05 · Commitment

My Commitment to Painting

I paint because the visible world is not enough for me.

I paint because I suspect there is more in things than their function.

I paint because I want to experience what lies behind outward appearance.

I paint against the idea of mute, dead and fully explicable matter.

I paint to make divisions permeable: between surface and space, sign and body, object and being, dream and reality.

Perhaps, for a moment, an image can show
what we cannot see as a whole in life.

Perhaps behind multiplicity lies unity. Perhaps the world itself has not yet finished dreaming.

“The image is matter
beginning to dream.”

Diethard Sohn · 2026