Biographie  deutsch - english

Info : deutsch - english

Paintings 1998 – 2001

Reiner Lichtenscheidt's paintings are not statements predefined in detail. They are generated during the process – they emerge. That what you can not describe rationally gets fluently released. The supports of the paintings, as canvas, wood and paper are the room for his vibrancy. He brings in his „atonal“ compositions, without neither being linked to any tonality nor submitted to any stipulated script or score. Because he does not make any preliminary layout. The principal work arises instantaneously, it is unique and inimitable, even for him self.

He „works on“ the painting supports with gestural paint brush hits and powerful spatula lines, composes signs which give, in spite of their deep black, a calligraphic impression. The partial overworks suggest notes and work traces which existed on the previous underground. This is how there is still appearing a part of what was latent and has been taken back.

The artist disposes on an individual cosmos of forms and signs. Therewith he presents his subjective breadth of vision which never appears as "constructed" but as organised by itself in the flow of the painting process. The "essential" grows and emerges through the quick marking, the informal colour painting, the pastose striations and the fragile lines. The human being, the nature and the creatures, everything is linked together. The extraneous and the familiar, agitation and calm, down-to-earth melancholy and aerial lightness – Reiner Lichtenscheidt's works live on this fundamental polarity – the co-existence of the antagonisms.

He paints on a changing brightness dark figural structures, archetypal forms or mystical signs and lets them deliberately „exsanguinate“– that's to say the fresh newly paint drips off. Growth and decay. Vanitas, the metaphor for the cycle of life is emblematised here.

„It is the fascination of the discovery – to experience the still not known and the still not accomplished“, as Reiner Lichtenscheidt self-describes. Therewith he justifies his pretension to diversity. This self provided freedom has lead to his grand work which is, with all the variety of materiality and spirituality very „peculiar“.

To paint, to get a picture of something: this is meditation and action at the same time. To reflect, to kick it up a notch in limitless, imaginary scopes. To keep the balance, in order to maintain the possibility to compensate the contradictions of life.