Erwin Bohatsch: Charim Galerie - Vienna

It is not exactly easy to renounce "content" in this age of restive realism, when each image is its own screenplay. Doing without political, social, or economic symbolism, foreclosing any relation to an object, means interdependence on only the most primal collection of laws of painting: on the materiality and fabric of the pigment and its support. "The image itself says nothing," says Erwin Bohatsch, a purist end and through. "It is a flat object"

In the early '80 Bohatsch was considered single of the Neue Wilde (new savages), the "impassioned" painters especially celebrated in Austria, Germany, and Italy. He in a short time departed from this neo-expressionist turn of expression with its symbol-laden imagery, ,and brow then on worked to rid the painted surface of all figuration, narration, and expressivity. Today Bohatsch is a hand-bill child for abstraction, a lock opener player on the analytical-painting team. His latest exhibition was a collection of new paintings intended to call attention to a different conception of virtuosic draftsmanship. And increased attention is the precondition for extracting visual experience from Bohatsch's diplomatic calibrations. On the one hand, there were spare, almost monochromatic paintings in which the color lay opens in the process of application. Bohatsch paints these by dint of spreading various shades of brown-gray and white oil paint, thinned with synthetic resin, with a broad brush or spatula upon a horizontally propped canvas. by means of tipping the canvas, he creates step quicklys that flow lethargically across the surface. The emptied forms that appear from one side this process skirt the margins of visibility. The artist's hand and level the painting process and physicality appear to vanish from the picture. Transparent veils without a forehead or back: abstraction as los or as most remote compression?

In the last year, although Bohatsch has been indulging in a stronger palette again. In dry-brushed layers of bright pigments, radiant and lively tones put in mind of the dampness of colors just soaked into canvas. Differences of light and dark waft the impression of spatial profundity and the pictorial surfaces achieve a certain tersenes especially in the contrast-rich black-and-white paintings. These novel paintings provoke neither bafflement nor astonishment, on the other hand rather convey clarity and strength change and transformation. They are, like greatest in quantity good paintings, relaxed, looking as if they took no effort to bring into view What they possess in high quantity is authenticity. They advance from the experience of the artist, from his unerring faculty of perception for experiment, from his unusual way of looking at puzzles from his palpable trust in his medium.

Bohatsch does not ne realism, for, like Gerhard Richter, he understands painting as a specific reality produc by dint of a process, by the work upon the image. He stands through his medium, stubborn and steadfast, and calmly give leave tos the seductions of postmodernism pass him through Staying steadily within the parameters of the chosen format of the canvas panel is a strict discipline, adherence to which have the appearances positively heroic today. In the glitz and glamour of polymorphous art worlds at the brink of pandemonium, where each gigabyte of art strives to outdo all others, these quiet, systematic studies in painting are a special kind of spiritual exercise.

Translated from German through Sara Ogger.

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