THOMAS GEYER
If Thomas Geyer could preserve the moment of beauty, of wonder, in a jar, he would. Instead, he rummages through his memories of aesthetic gazes and moments of longing and transforms them into atmospheric paintings.
As a symbiosis between subjective perception and artistic post- correction, Geyer himself is the yardstick, the interface between real experience and momentary sensation. On his excursions into nature, he settles where he himself feels most at home. Usually, this is at harmonious meeting points of human life and scenic wilderness that reflect Geyer's personal habitat between city and country: an overgrown backyard, a lake with a boarding ladder, peaked houses jutting out from behind dunes.
With natural colours that glow from within themselves, such as night blue, forest green and evening red-pink, the artist directs all his attention to the narrative potential that he has discovered for himself in this moment. Combined with matte nuances and light reflections, the result is a seemingly random interplay of shadows, occasionally mirroring in the blue-green lake water, and other times settling as a moonlit glimmer on the white sandy beach. When Thomas Geyer longs back to those balmy summer evenings, sea breezes, or springtime feelings in the studio, he brings out the preserved impressions, the light, the smells, and sounds and spreads them out on the canvases. Light spot by light spot, canopy by canopy, he digs back into their narrative atmospheres and begins to unfold their stories anew.
In his narratives, he reveals just enough to make us feel at home in his settings - and yet leaves room for individual secrets. In this way, the artist not only grants us entry into his refuges but opens them up as settings in which our own memories may take place. It is the intensity of the moment, the absolute beauty and emotion that made Geyer a painter. But there is also a seriousness in the artist's longing, an impending doom that accompanies us all - the loss of a habitat of which we ourselves are a component.
And it is important to feel the gaps, says Thomas Geyer. Without them, there would be no desire, no sense of transience, no appreciation for wonder, for all the fleeting things he wants to preserve as a painter. And when the artist sets off again from his studio to be found by his motifs with a wandering eye, he always has a jar with him to later share his intense experience with us.
– Sonja Gatterwe
