Ocinebra

»What can we do when everything is done?«

So Josef Beuys asked and tore open doors with it. Anselm Kiefer answered the question with celestial areas, asteroid shoals, rain sparks, spirals, galaxies, stellar nebulae and lime-white star numbers.

It's just not all done!

Not all dimensions of reality, not those of our dreams. Another, almost infinite world awaits further discovery and exploration. She was barely depicted: The magic in the oceanic depth, the all-changing movement of the water itself: The dissolution and fascinating transformation of all earthly structures and forms into shapes that can only be grasped for nanoseconds, floating in the cosmos of water. Early on I dedicated myself to this world of water. Until now, in the world of art, water was considered something soft, numinous, formless, which is difficult to represent. This reducing perspective prevented a fundamental examination of the primal life element water.

We know the iron saying: "Only when something takes shape does it begin to live!". It will remain a mystery that this guiding principle, especially with regard to the artistic representation of water, has not yet been noticed by artists.

Earth and plant, animal and man have been explored with meticulous depth in art for thousands of years, but not water. However, when the world of water is recognized, seen and experienced in form, the prerequisite for the representation of this fascinating universe is given. To this end, the typical optical expressions that occur exclusively in the water had to be emphasized, condensed and expressed in the picture in terms of composition. Only then could the artistic adventure of making the body water visible begin. It was not uncommon for me to discover characteristics and peculiarities of water that I had never seen before, the implementation of which is difficult and takes time to implement.

A striking water phenomenon - caused by the coexistence of calm and turbulent water - represents the "dualistic appearance" of forms of all kinds in the world of water. If this optical play takes place with a human face, for example, the effect is most astonishing: while the one half of the face is barely the other appears distorted and disfigured, sometimes even completely destroyed. Sometimes this destruction - I am inclined to say capricious, completely freely invented forms - forms which have nothing at all to do with the face that we are dealing with here: At least nothing concerning the recognizable shape of the face.

How astonished I was when I saw half of a bather's head and upper body suddenly being carried away and taking the shape of a table at a distance! Thousands of such optical phenomena of apparent confusion I have observed so far. Of course, it was only possible to capture a fraction of this.

The optical phenomena in water are similar, no matter whether they take place in a river, in a lake, in the sea or in a water-based varnish. In the world of water, the simplest is visually evoked as the most complicated, the best known as the most foreign.

Water is a phenomenon; it contains all styles, yet expresses itself only in one: that of water.

Léos Aqua Aqua