Norbert Schwontkowki “The Edge of the Visible world”  

Gallery B:  Opening 11 May 2007 – from 11 May  to  27 July 2007

Press Release

Pictorial representation is always commonly considered bound, by physical rules and by three-dimensional space coordinates, to our perception. The use of a technique instead of another, the colour layout on the canvas and the features, suggest emotive approaches which are rooted to the personalities and emotional conditions of who observes and produces the image.

It seems that, in the case of Norbert Schwontkowski, the physical limits of the pictorial image have been put aside and relegated in the darkest corner of our perception and that these paintings can expand in our contemplation like doors opened on new dimensions.

On one side the subjects represented and on the other, colours as brown, black, grey and pale yellows prolong our attention not limiting our view to the temporal condition anymore, cancelling the space coordinates of the object that physically tied it up. The metaphysical attraction of these paintings though, is not a solemn quotation but presents an ironic and disenchanted approach to the object or the subjects represented. They only seem to ask us to be taken seriously in consideration but then, they show themselves in a manner that makes one smile. This can recall the line of one of the protagonists of “Arabian Nights” who affirms “Loyalty is a good thing, but so is lightness” and this declaration seems to be the veil that mysteriously wraps these paintings. In them, one can feel the mystery and the melancholic vision of the world in which uselessness of consumerist demands and the superficiality of life’s desires have become vane.

All this, reveals the look of a child standing on the door of the visible world, enjoying making graffiti on his home walls, of subjects and aspects of a world which is filtered by his amused and enchanted look. These works don’t actually have noble icons and references but they are related to primitive Romanesque representations in the attempt to reconcile, in a modern way, the merely physical and earthly dimension with the meditative and spiritual one.