You’ll end up alone, like an animal.*

The image is a play of light and dark, of kneeling and falling. The canvas is populated by people ashamed to stand upright, imprisoned in psychological gravitational fields weighing them down to the ground. The ground is mutable; in some places porous and treacherous like marshland, in others sprouting hard edges resembling knives of terracotta, designed for cutting and slicing flesh. Figures are emerging from the earth, covered in mud; living alloys of sand, water, and soil. Elsewhere the charcoal stick has given the human beings the form of tombstones, patched with white marble, rocks attempting to unfold their wings, halfway unreal and completely inexplicable to themselves.

This is a reality where everybody is guilty and all ways out are closed off by the underlying gesso and large brushstrokes of black and white oil paint. The figures are formed by a charcoal stick that nails them down and captures them in certain positions, while simultaneously introducing a new type of clarity. Some are huddling under a threatening sky, terrified to stand upright; others are squatting down in maternal poses. One figure, rendered transparent by too little charcoal, is attempting to wash his hands in the soil, to dry off the blood on the rocks. He is dreaming that God is an ocean of white doves, while Goya’s melancholy dog is licking charcoal and blood from his fingertips.

A desolate universe is depicted here, a Waste Land where light penetrates light, but where the figures nevertheless remain in the dark. A Biblical landscape of spirit and barren lands is unfolding. The humans therein are formed as mythical images of eternal exile and sacrifices in holy rituals that engender cultural structures. The characters are filtered through themes of shame in a shameless world, of guilt that can never be cleansed, and of hateful and destructive minds rebelling against life; a life that suddenly changes its course, leaving bitterness and hatred behind, suddenly afloat and filled with gratitude, warmth, and an amazement for the continual newness of all things, before it once again alters its course and becomes sick with uncertainty.

This image is no satire of human foolishness, there is no ironic outsider’s gaze; the pictorial space is not filled with the colder skies of Modernism, these are not humans bereft of their existential foothold staggering across the canvas, nor are they frozen in isolation, inaccessible on opposite sides of the café table. Nor do the charcoal lines ridicule the endlessly accessible postmodern individual, open like a TV set, who in a moment of knowing is cowering in shame over his own accessibility. The artist is existentially intertwined in the image, and so this is not a tableau meant to criticize the decadence, the degradation and general corruption of our civilization. Instead, it is narrating a story of a way to walk, search, and learn.

The painting is struggling to get a grip on the immediately incomprehensible inherent in the statement I am. It is insisting that truths about the human being exist, that a hidden wholeness is at work within each one of us, and that we are coming into being in contexts that we can only vaguely suspect. These are worlds we cannot point to or arrive at through dissection or analysis. The invisible world is revealing itself in glimpses in the way the colors are hunching on the canvas, in the angles the light follows, in the lines forming the figures' contours, and in the geometrical relationships anchoring the pictorial plane in its distinctive balance.

In the play between light and dark, between upright and bent, shades of gray and hard, pitch dark lines and uneven strokes of burnt and raw umber are playing with layers and layers of realities. The colors are revealing something unknown; a strange death at work within the image, opening up abysses inside the universe conjured up by the charcoal strokes, submerging our psyche in a darkness shutting out all life. In another pictorial layer, the span of colors and values open up for intense and luminous realities, flinging the figures with new hope into themselves. In these gravitational fields, the characters are attempting to anchor themselves, to become aware of what they are and where they belong. What kind of life they are living. Through gestures and poses, they are turning to a different reality for a hint on what lines they must draw to bring a self into this world.

Just off the image's center, the charcoal dust is forming the hands of an upright figure into something resembling a prayer: the human being's sign that he is living in a mystical world he does not understand. He is addressing it, attempting to get reality to speak to him, pressing his body against invisible limits. He is longing for a self within the self that is far greater than the self. Halfway conscious and halfway real, he murmurs stories about a life force in motion, crossing boundaries between the sacred and the profane. Reaching out for a world where things are strongly related, where the elements lose their characteristics and limits and merge with one another, forming new constellations, generating worlds within worlds, which are again dissolved, floating forth, perpetually coming into being and being dissolved again.

In this desolate landscape, there are no rituals that can take him by the hand and show him the way. He is a mythical figure in a landscape free of myths. In the far background of the painting, a cityscape emerges: dark, massive, and threatening. It is a closed-off cosmos without a center, communicating through its worldly images; a daily unloading of myths embodied as signs flickering across LCD screens, installing themselves as digital configurations. The urban human being is intravenously connected to a stream of images sealing him off inside a profane metabolism.

He is about to end up alone, like an animal in the dark. He mutters about longings with a tongue made of charcoal and prays for another metabolism, searching for new images. He has fallen outside the life that passes on life. He is staring into a monotonous chain of cosmic catastrophes, dimly seeing vigorous arms of light at the far end of the painting. Life that is being passed on. Living dead let go by Death. He is screaming, not in a deafening and hoarse way, but whiningly, in a squeaking voice, like a teething child, frightened in the dark.