For a philosopher Painting

For a philosopher, for Rainer Maria Rilke. A picture in the newspaper of a horse burned by forest fire was the beginning of a series of 'horse' paintings I made for my Rilke exhibition. The bare horse lay on his back with his legs up. In a strange way that horse suddenly came very close, it was almost human. I could understand this animal, this equine, as an abstraction of the whole world (as Rilke did at one point in his life). The shape of the horse evolved into a point for balancing on the border of figuration and abstraction. A simple, but emotional shape, a transition from man to nature. The horse in the painting is being explored as an abstraction of a great living being, which has almost something human, but due to its size beyond the proportions of the coverable. It is monumental and vulnerable at the same time.