Martin Pohl - On the Limits of Painting

His art is essentially non-iconic and has developed into a style of painting that explores even the limits of images. His works analyze the way images are looked at. With his broad palette knife strokes, he has underlined the meaning of painting as a gesture, and yet he has remained within—or at least on—the boundaries of non-figurative painting. The series Museen [Museums] is indeed connected to the showrooms which the artist has visited and seen. He has adopted Naturalism rather than merely depicting it, even when his brushless painting comes close to representing landscapes, especially mountains. Martin Pohl’s manner of painting is contemporary and takes the developments of the past forty years into consideration. It follows a personal path on which the cognizability of the world, the sky, or the mountains, for instance, merely contributes to the represented idea and is never descriptive. Pohl models the paint. He has a penchant for monochromy and for capturing light, in order to emphasize the plasticity of the substance. His study of sculpture in Val Gardena has left its record. The use of hot wax with pigments calls to mind a manual method of art that was common in the ancient tradition of encaustic. The immediate and bold application of color lends his works their special energy and luminosity.