Instant Landscapes

The work of Thomas Blases centers around something that has occupied painters from the beginning. They try to capture that that we experience. To capture what we sense as a space inside  ourselves both as light and mood and instantaneous feelings that are awakened, to capture in drawings, to commit colors and structures to  the surface and with these  envision the cosmic complexity in the aesthetic order of the painting and the reassure order in themselves.

The painter sees himself placed in the situation and before the task of finding a valid picture that contains the dimensions of our lives in spite of, and in light of, the increasing speed at which the delivered current pictures change and have to be taken seriously. His search plays itself out in the process of painting and reflects itself there in.

Working on paper using various paint and sketching materials is appreciated as a work process that shows the spontaneity and openness along with all its interruptions and disruptions in the path towards visualization. Here it can be seen in which way layers of color lay on each other, flow into each other and stand out. Colors and other additives keep their transparency and constitute ambivalent situations that range between the creation of color mode and the coverage the surface. Often lines cross encircle and enclosed them. The painter lays out graphic structures that can tighten ball themselves up, that rise and break off again, spread over the colors and dominate the surface just like they can perception of perspective along with space.

This results in a kind of possible containment of the surface in a space that ultimately eludes the visible perspective. Through fields of color from the drawings the eye imagines light and space fills the wealth of associations with moods. Lights and shadowed spaces summon up landscapes that are only fleetingly perceived, are not constant appear to find themselves in a state of constant transformation. Association within the work is disturbed again because it asserts itself an abstract structure. In this way the imagination is time and time again made insecure, interrupted and deceived.

The moment of recognition is fleeting. The painting states its case and it stays open. The painting's order rises and crashes again, reflects itself in itself and starts anew.

To the code of the readable signs, the atmospheric value of the colors, the blackness of the lines and the emptiness of the foundation steps the impulse of the hand in the motion of drawing, the accidentiality in the development of the color and the physicality of the material.

Every painting is the interaction with the practiced eye. In the painting the artist time and again abandons this conflict in order to create a different view. This is approaches something wants to become visible.

Thomas Blase's paintings remain ambiguous, a distribution point for pictures that have been deposited in the world and in us - places on which new pictures want to spread out.

Cornelia Wieg, 2003

http://www.landschaften-2003.de/teilnehmer/t_blase.html