"Protocols of Observation" - A Manifesto to Representational Painting - by Kurt Stimmeder

Figurative painting represents for me the tool of any expression. To make intangible and feelings tangible, where words are unclear, music and movement are fleeting, the representational in an always moving time, pauses.

The goal is not to find solutions to problems or answers to questions, but to capture moments allegorically. My pictures are landmarks of the flow of life.

As a basis I formed the following position:

Things and man are free of meaning and significance. They acquire these only through the observation by the latter.

Painting is for this my evidence, because ultimately the observer always tells about himself in its description.

Since the effect of gender, common history, cultural imprinting, as well as environment and social influences in the core can not be dismissed - views on it change after all only slowly - thereby an apparent overlap in the perception arises.

An approximate reality with relative values to which we try to cling.

For me, these form the core of everything relevantly intangible. They form the substrate of our emotions, which incessantly force us to judge meaning, action and significance.

In my painting this point of view is expressed by the constantly changing colors over the years. All color spectra, from black and white to brightly colored running through, I try to represent the invisible in my paintings.

To give the shown a "soul", virtually an invisible label, with the inscription "Observed by man and provided with meaning and significance".

Arrived at a very reduced palette (ocher, red, white, black) developed incidentally more and more concrete, exact forms. For me, an even clearer indication to see the origin of all invisible within the form and thus also the body.

I therefore see any abstract representation as superfluous and only as an experimental transitional act that must inevitably end in the representational.

For there lies its origin, from which it can under no circumstances detach itself.

My pictures are "protocols of observation" for the creation of which I draw on real models, objects and photographs, as well as my emotions and the mind forced by them.