Florin Kompatscher: Neonville

Florin Kompatscher explicitly and passionately acknowledges his role as a painter. He makes paintings. This description does not, however, adequately describe his life as an artist. His painting is in fact often not contented with the traditionally allotted surface within the boundaries of the picture; rather, it extends beyond, also in terms of material them materially and occupies the walls; or else it takes on a life of its own and, with its physical presence, appropriates the entire space, imposing its own paradoxical logic on it and transforming it into a scenario that, as it were, absorbs and incorporates those who enter. Painting as such becomes the protagonist of a theatrical event that is only completed by the viewer’s intervention. (Margareta Sandhofer, 2020)

Neonville brings together works by Florin Kompatscher from the past two years, during which the artist increasingly embraced a new, luminous color palette. In addition to the eponymous paintings, the exhibition features oil works on mirrored paper from the series Mountains, Seas, and Giants as well as the four-part canvas cycle Ocean.
The suggested landscape elements in these works are transformed into abstraction. Line patterns in blue, created using stencils and masking techniques, contrast with a magenta background, while painted pyramidal surfaces are structured by striking horizontal lines. The compositions evoke associations with ocean surfaces and mountain silhouettes in their broad spectrum of sunset colors, along with the deep light rays that accompany them.