| Elmar Trenkwalder
Born in 1959, Weissenbuch, Austria. He lives and works in Innsbruck.
Untitled, 1998
plaster
75 x 20 x 20 cm
Courtesy Elmar Trenkwalder
Untitled, 2003
watercolour on paper, plaster
83 x 56 x 8 cm
Courtesy Elmar Trenkwalder
According to Max Weiler, with whom I began my art studies, the "d'après nature" was not an academic principle as such, but rather an aspect, which emerged in approaching a universal totality, which needs to be investigated. Along with the usual live studies I was trying to go through the world interpreted by the great painters. In the first place I concentrated on Goya's visionary paintings, which resulted in a series of heads inspired by his
Madrid frescos. Velasquez's Aesop became one of the recurring
elements of some of my portraits. I often used black and white reproductions, which I would reinterpret with colours. My interest in painting reproductions drove me to work in taking inspiration from anonymous photographs, cards, recovered photographs, which I would only partially paint over and which I would house in my personal pictorial world. The d'après gave way to manipulation, quotation, to the allusion to paintings and works, which integrated by means of my imaginary world. I more and more drew and painted following the interior images gushing from my very own flux of life and impressions, looking for that state of mind, which manifests itself in dream to people asleep; where the
complex occurrences of life build up into visionary images through the analytic and synthetic thought, reflecting, but
not like in a mirror, yet like in a structured surface, which only absorbs parts of the spectrum, and thus produces
a coloured and differentiated image of the world's materiality.
E. T.