The painter’s flow: Molls painter’s flow

 

Christian Moll: One who lives and breathes colours. Out of whom pictures must emerge and go into the world. And if only a little later to disappear again under the layers of the painting process, under new pictures. Maybe blackness last. Or isn’t everything there, and sometimes almost too much?

Just as sensitive as uncompromising, the paintings of the painter Christian Moll penetrate to a deeply internalized district of emotions, memories and visionary faces and bring out something completely new
out of the seemingly familiar and well known in their impressive colourfulness and brilliance, which can expand by surprising dimensions and thus enrich the reality of a face, a figure, a scene – basically the human.
Christian Moll’s expressive painting constantly explores,
investigates (sounds out) and illuminates its limits – yes, it challenges the vital with great vehemence and willingness to take risks. It is physical in the best sense of the word and, as such, exerts itself in the greatest possible fullness of the act of painting, which ultimately results in emptiness, exhaustion and redemption at the same time. That the paintings do not shy away from the large format, the spirited stroke and application of colour, the dynamic composition, is directly related to this.

Physis and psyche prove to be the two sides of a powerful and obsessively performed action that seeks to emphasize the oscillating ambivalence rather than the clear distinction between opposites. Because with a view to the living: what
is meant by inside and outside? Strange and familiar? Young, old? Birth and death?

Moll does not avoid these apparent contradictions; instead, he confronts them in ever new approaches and carries out a research of the human condition, a research that knows about
its provisional nature, perhaps even about its futility of being able to definitely ascertain a “That’s it (This is how it is)” but precisely this underlines the existential quality. The metamorphoses of the physical are not recorded in these representations. They are released and thus come to themselves in the best sense of the word.

As if an exchange had taken place and the tense interior had emerged in a concrete form, the picture is now a visible expression of these passionate voyages of discovery and an equally devoted desire to experiment. Only in these extremely intensely experienced, trance-like states of “flow” is the painter able to penetrate his pictorial sources and bring them to an almost unintentional stream to which he entrusts and surrenders himself in painting. “Pictorial thinking,” Christian Moll calls it, “thinking in pictures.” Perhaps it is an attempt to penetrate into the essence of colours themselves in those pictorial spaces, to open up new possibilities and freedoms for them. But certainly it is also a celebration of life, and of the living, without losing sight of the time that brings and takes, that keeps everything in motion without ceasing. The presence manifested in these
paintings is fragile and powerful at the same time.

Thus the
paintings approach their viewers directly and can challenge their gaze in many ways: they encounter each other with irritating beauty as well as with disturbing horror and recognize themselves in happy but also rare – and all the more valuable – moments.

Andreas Kohm