Florin KompatscherMalerei 2005–2010

Over the past five years, Florin Kompatscher has found a remarkable balance in his oil painting between surreal metaphor and spatial depth on the one hand and an abstract-seeming condensation or dissolution on the other. He is indeed holding a difficult balance, and with it holds his pictures in a state of suspension that constantly draws the memory of the familiar over into a somnambulistic moment of transition. Anyone who wishes may of course search these pictures for quotations, for traces of Dalí, Magritte, Tanguy, perhaps also C. D. Friedrich. But those who would rather see how terrain thought to have been exhausted is made fruitful for a renewed and highly surprising abstraction can be part of stirring battles of form and colour here. The book demonstrates them in exemplary fashion; it is far removed from any weary didacticism and is thus a pure painterly battle of a kind that really could not be more beautiful!