Florian Thomas
Malerei
27.11.2005 – 01.01.2006

When one encounters works by Florian Thomas, for example at an art fair, it can easily happen that the figurative and non-figurative motifs are attributed to different authors. On the way to a better understanding, to answer the question about the common source for the pictorial compositions that at first sight appear so completely different, we can identify two very different points of orientation: the late paintings of the radical painter Günter Fruhtrunk (1923–1982) and the interiors of the English Pop artist Richard Hamilton (born 1922).
Since 1992 there have been large-format paintings that almost always consist of vertically structured color fields, which are partly separated by precisely geometrically arranged vertical lines. A common characteristic of these compositions is in every case the thinly glazed application of acrylic paint.
With it, Florian Thomas has established a careful balance that unfolds a very particular play between “concrete painting” (Fruhtrunk) and illusory spatial depth: a play of “bringing into appearance” and at the same time hiding again behind a semi-transparent veil. Although the geometrically structured but very openly and transparently painted color fields are repeatedly interrupted by disturbing elements, sometimes even running across the picture, the clear division nevertheless remains preserved.
In these pictures the viewer is again and again thrown back onto the pure physicality of the colored surfaces. In his newer large-format panels Florian Thomas risks the use of the entire spectrum of the color circle. More than before, he lets the paint run wherever it wants to go.
This increasing element of freedom in the production of the pictures, the allowing of accidental picture factors including his own mood, may have contributed to the fact that next to the pattern of color dialogues with their different spatial depths there appeared the pattern of certain photographic image templates. For seven to eight years found models from postcards, magazines and picture books, for example about South Africa from the seventies, have appeared as direct templates for new pictures.
In the selection of motifs a trained sensibility comes into action, which on the one hand has received its imprint through his own abstract picture compositions. On the other hand a deeper lying sense of imagery is activated, which has its roots in sentimental memories and the self-forgetful play of the eye.
In the staging of these photographically reproduced image worlds the artist must rely on his intuition; there are no clear instructions for action. The goal is the paradoxical desire to bring forth pictures and at the same time to hide them again, to make them invisible again in their clarity. The paintings conceived according to photographic templates are arrested images in the course of a story, which imagine a second look at a situation to be empathized with, without touching the logic of its origin.
On closer inspection one actually sees nothing in the pictures, that is, one looks into the abyss that opens as the intermediate space between a possible remembered event and its reconstruction. Florian Thomas relies on the luck of the flâneur who casually comes across undiscovered everyday things, dwellings of longing, which he shapes into real images with the camera or with paintings.
The choice of the image section or the classical technique of the half-closed eye are essential tools on the way of image creation. On the basis of the non-figurative pictures with the running streams of acrylic color Florian Thomas composes a painting that covers reality as with a veil and thereby—paradoxically—makes it accessible to memory and thus also to reflection.
The private photograph, the “unforgettable glance,” is enlarged to the format of a classical film advertisement, deprived of its privacy, it becomes publicly accessible. Through its translation, its transference into painting, it loses its directness and above all its embeddedness in a quickly told story. It is assigned a new context.
The enrichment with a new aura makes it accessible again to the experience that had been lost. Painting, as a special form of thinking, opens again the perceptual organs that have been worn out and sealed by too rapid a succession of images. It contributes significantly to slowing down the stream of communication and thereby to establishing the precondition for regaining human experiences of places, moods and special situations.
Florian Thomas’s pictures open up the happiness of perception that arises when, in viewing, every goal-directed intention is lost and suddenly the eye alone finds its way into paradise.

Ulrich Bischoff

Curated by Thomas Trümper.