On process, themes, and the pursuit of psychological presence in painting
Short Statement In my work, I focus on small, often overlooked moments in which the body reveals something internal.
Hands often play a central role, as their tension, hesitation, or uncertainty can express more than a face. Before painting, I work in the studio with short, simple movement studies. These create small gestures or postures that are visible only for a brief moment. They are not staged or theatrical, but arise from an inner tension. I look for those quiet, charged moments in which the figure reveals something without showing it directly. The detailed execution of the painting is meant to make this psychological density perceptible.
Foto: Roland von der Aist
Extended Statement
I paint oil on canvas. I work in Linz.
What interests me is the small thing that slips in from the unconscious: what the body reveals without our wanting or controlling it. The hand that holds too tight. The jaw that opens. A tension waiting for release, perhaps long overdue. Moments before it surfaces, in the middle of it, or just after. In any case, a point where some resistance gives way.
My paintings come about with models, in a kind of systemic constellation of the sort used in psychotherapy. I set out a sketch and an idea, sometimes only a key moment, bring the participants together, and let them interact. Scenarios arise on their own. I watch and wait until a pose gives way and something comes through that can’t be staged.
Since 2018, art historical references in my work have served to describe the contemporary zeitgeist. A neo-romantic reading suggests itself: just as Romanticism idealized the Middle Ages to compensate for hyperrationalism and the frustration of old power structures forever reasserting themselves, my references point to the same compensatory mechanism, now at work in the collective unconscious.
In “The Golden Blessing,” two women in golden garments, almost as if at a party, meet Raphael’s quiet, static Christ. The opposites don’t merely sit side by side: the gesture of Christ’s hand, the magic wand in the women’s grip connect them, like a bridge between eras that opens a world of its own beyond time. For me the painting was a beginning, the moment I started to give room to human softness.
A series made in early 2026 turned toward rage, toward the dead flesh I pulled to the center of the foreground, with no way to look away; the tattoos are the ornaments of the Baroque translated into now.
Out of that series came “L’Origine du langage”: a piece of flesh as pre-linguistic matter, as substance that exists before we grasp it in language. The title shifts Courbet’s “L’Origine du monde”: from the origin of life to the origin of language. Behind it stands Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei, the lamb in the moment before the cut, still whole, already consecrated.
In the end we’re speaking of aphorisms that describe one thing: a journey inward. “The Heroine’s Journey” plays with all the preceding elements. A figure steps into a landscape after Bruegel; only the momentary truth won’t show itself directly. The head is blurred, granting the viewer every possible authority of interpretation. Yet the near-formless may also remind us that figurative painting, of all things, isn’t about what can be seen, and therein lies its strength.
My work asks to be read as a contemporary symbolism. Following the words of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “Love is to give what one does not have,” it extends a hand to the viewer: to lay one’s own story into the work. It is ready to carry it.
The Working Method Genesis Everything I paint can ultimately be traced back to a single question: what comes before language? Genesis shows how that question developed over eighteen years — the individual phases, the works that came out of them, and how my own view of it changed along the way. Read the method → Foto: Roland von der Aist
