Matthias Dornfeld • Alles Gute! • 04.09.–26.10.2013

Alles Gute ! Best Wishes !

Did the colour come first? Cinnabar green and madder lake, caput mortuum, ivory black, cadmium yellow, cobalt violet, ultramarine… planes of colour collide with each other, are layered on top of one another, removed again, reapplied.

Or did the painting begin with a line – incised, or in charcoal, graphite, biro or oil pastel? This line becomes a woman, a flower, a vase, a bunch of flowers, a suggestion of a room, a landscape, a face, many faces.

Matthias Dornfeld’s paintings are distinguished by a sensual directness and an attitude of openness, but this goes just as much for the drawings on paper and other substrates.

There may be room for inscrutability and doubt in Matthias Dornfeld’s pictures, but at the same time one also sees in them a great love of things and of life itself. They are at once vigorous and direct, tender and delicate. The dark and the uncanny encounter beauty, lightness and sensuality.

Just as he often takes a highly experimental approach to colour and line, Matthias Dornfeld also plays with various scales. There are some very small, extremely concentrated paintings, but also large surfaces covered over and over with pigment, though the image may just as well emerge from no more than a few delicate lines. Sometimes Matthias Dornfeld has small-format drawings blown up into large-format black and white screen prints so that he can then continue reworking them in oils. This seals a new alliance between the painterliness of such drawings and the linearity of the paintings.

Abstraction and empathy: lines and colours become ever new figures, faces, bunches of flowers, both prototypical and individual. They are timeless, but with a presence that is absolutely contemporary.

Christine Heidemann