A piece of paper, a canvas, a piece of linoleum – a line incised, or in charcoal, graphite, biro or oil paint. The line becomes a woman, a flower, a vase, a bunch of flowers, a suggestion of a room, a landscape, a face, many faces.

A new piece of paper, a new canvas, a new linoleum: a new line, another woman, another flower, another vase, another face.
Or did the colour come first? Cinnabar green and madder lake, caput mortuum, ivory black, cadmium yellow, cobalt violet, ultramarine… planes of colour collide with one another, are layered on top of one another, removed again, applied again – until, out of the colours and lines, a picture has emerged on the canvas.

These paintings are distinguished by a sensual directness and an attitude of openness, equally the linocuts and the drawings on paper.

The dissolution of forms produces new forms – but this dissolution, unlike the abstractions of post-war modernism, is not first and foremost an expression of doubt. There is room for doubt in Matthias Dornfeld‘s pictures, but at the same time one also sees in them a great love of things and of life itself. They are at once vigorous and direct, tender and delicate. The dark and the uncanny encounter beauty, lightness and sensuality. Abstraction and empathy: lines and colours become ever new figures, faces, bunches of flowers, both prototypical and individual. They are timeless, but with a presence that is absolutely contemporary. A new piece of paper, a new canvas, a new piece of linoleum, a new line.   Read More