Inspiration

My artwork has changed radically over the last 45 years. While for me as a teenager Pablo Picasso with his work and his life was a magical and unattainable model and his death in 1973 an unbearable pain, my interest very quickly focused on Surrealism.

André Breton, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst and of course Salvador Dali and their work were important companions for me also on the meta level. And the questions that have arisen with them still concern me today in every artistic process, whether I am working on a picture or a text: What am I actually doing? And why do I do it exactly like that?

Soon I discovered the "Vienna School of Fantastic Realism", especially Ernst Fuchs, Rudolf Hausner and Arik Brauer. Painting at the borderline between reality and abstraction, between dream and reality.
Mythical creatures that could be discovered in the rock formations of the native mountains, the brilliance of polished rocks in the brook and in addition line structures that created caves and islands. As a real model unreal enough to be found in the rock towers of Meteora in Greece.

In the mid-1980s, a motorcycle accident marked a sudden break as the culmination of a series of personal disasters. The river broke off, and after resurfacing after intensive care and weeks, months in the hospital room I was another.
From violent speed as pace of life had become a calmer flow. Where the head just wanted to pass through the wall, it opened for me now for the way of meditation and contemplation.

This was accompanied by a shift of interests from painting to writing. The greater precision of words and sentences seemed to me a better shield against misunderstandings and surprising interpretations such as I had experienced in my exhibitions, where things were read out of my pictures that I had never painted into them for sure.

Although many of my literary texts of that time are quite surreal, they are far less arbitrary in their mysteriousness than some of my pictures at that period.

What am I doing? And why exactly like that? At about the turn of the millennium, painting actually came back into my life without any action, after having drawn a little now and then for many years until then. And always only mandalas, meditation images whose power comes on the one hand from the archetypes of the unconscious, and on the other from the formal language of Asian worlds of faith.

I realized that I had to paint the mystery into the painting myself and that I could not leave it to chance or the patient application of many layers of paint in order to fall into a new kind of arbitrariness.

My answer therefore has been radical simplification. And the question was: What gives the shape of the square?

Equal length sides and right angles: What's possible in this corset? How do the squares of different sizes and colours compete against each other in an image?

Do only the (too?) light ones tilt the structure? Which square immediately attracts the viewer's attention? And why is that so?

My square pictures are not only abstract, they are much stricter, "abstrict". They point to nothing. And the challenge is that the viewer comes to rest in front of the picture, also becomes mentally still, so that the picture can develop its pull.

The mystery is painted into the picture, but it is not of the kind that you can say: "Look!" Precisely because the squares do not contain any particles of reality, the mystery can only unfold in the interaction. It is, so to speak, an inverse uncertainty relation when the square image becomes clearer for the viewer when viewed for a long time. And the viewer can ultimately focus more sharply himself when all the curls of his questions and thoughts have distorted. Look ...

Tom Becker