HABUB OVER DARFUR

In the marsh-lands of the river Elbe between Hamburg and the North Sea I relaunched my career as a painter. It had ended abruptly, back in1980, when I enthusiastically decided to engage in the promotion of world peace. Today I look back – more realistically – on forty years of professional experience. I worked as a mediator, special envoy, or Swiss ambassador in countries like Rwanda, Nepal, Sudan, Georgia, Armenia, Cameroun to name just a few. It may seem quite a shift to leave the atelier to working as a diplomat, but it is not. For me as a young student at the Art Academy Basel (FHNW), art had always been the foundation of peace, and peace – especially after World War II – was always the necessary basis for the free production of art in a liberal and open society. If the space of freedom is shrinking artists are at risk. The paintings of the last couple of years reveal my personal story insofar as they transfer empirical knowledge via individual experience to the sphere of visual art. “Biographical realism” might be the adequate label for what I would like to share with the viewers: visual expressions of hardship and hope in times of armed violence, natural disasters, and worsening “conditions humaines”. The works produced between Winter 2017/18 and Summer 2026 broadly fall into four categories: The first of these can be summarized under the heading “human-nature relations under stress”. These large-format paintings engage with impressions of degraded landscapes, potential risks, or future environmental calamities in the mountains, the sea or the African context. The second category reflects impressions from various conflict-affected areas, such as Darfur in Western Sudan and the Southern Caucasus. The concept of “militarized borders”, “lines of contact” or “dividing lines” secured by barbwire in the 21st century irritated me most. The third category emerged due to a highly unexpected crisis that hit us all: the historic Covid-19 pandemic. The somehow dark works created during the pandemic miraculously opened new avenues towards more colourful abstractions. It is experimental in terms of the mix of materials, the textures, and the use of oil, acrylic, and spray. My art works play with symbolic dimensions of the perceived reality. Historic or contextual narratives can be represented in a generalized and abstracted manner. The viewer is challenged by situational structures and clouds of significance rather than naturalistic descriptions. Untethering the paintings from naturalistic representation enables them to mirror a radical change of perspective, one that approaches a bird ́s-eye view. The perspective from above dissolves the romantic landscape into elements of earth structures as they may appear from a high altitude. I would call it, accordingly, “earth-scape” rather than “landscape”. This view allows me to compose quite paradoxical images – for example, painting the alpine region in confrontation with the rise of the sea in times of extreme drought (“Glaciers are melting – sea levels are rising”). Another element of my paintings is the use of natural materials such as sand (from Sudan or the North Sea), stones, and wood. The use of these materials is not a substitute for the process of painting and brushing. To the contrary, I see them as an integral part of the artwork itself. Material is colour, and colour is material.