Vitrum_008 Painting

Non-representational complexity and its structures Dieter Franke´s works are complexly structured investigations of unknown areas on canvas and acrylic glass. His subject is the non-representational. He doesn´t care for copying anything existing or its abstraction. There is no hidden code and no anticipated interpretation. Instead, the beholders can create their own intense and concise association. The artist´s main interest is the “workflow-experiment”. For him each finished picture (or sequence of pictures) is a unique, unrepeatable documentation of a very special process: It is about how his own, subjective ideas of shaping and structuring finally bring about a certain convincing form. Dieter Franke navigates between conception and chance, between purposeful action and intuitive reaction. He tests his own abilities to deal with the immanent dynamics of each picture and to handle the sometime whimsical obstinacy of his working materials. In his art something unpredictable shows up constantly, that crosses the borders of conceptual planning and traditional perception. Extreme, self-defined vertical and oblong formats are Dieter Franke´s test objects. On these surfaces he connects spacious structures on the one hand and precisely detailed structures on the other hand to an extraordinary picturesque tectonic profile that captivates the beholders´ attentiveness. The pigments and the way they influence his working process play an important role due to their special textures and different drying times. Subtly differentiated black-and-white contrasts and shades of grey dominate his works on canvas. Contrarly, he uses intense and radiant colours with a special expression: dazzling white and deep lacquered black, powerful and rich blue and the shining gold of Indian Yellow imitation. Dieter Franke experiments in a completely new way with the challenge of inversion on acrylic glass. He aims at a different kind of painting regarding the traditional composition and perception. When painting on canvas the picture is built up layer for layer „to the front“. But the paintings he creates on acrylic glass ask for an inverse composition. The most detailed visible structures are not the layers applied at last – these are rather often quite raw and thick. Of prime importance are instead the first layers of pigments and their subtle interaction, applied at the very beginning of the working process.