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  • Taking ons’s bearings

    Karen Straub

    Translation from German by Tim Chafer

     

    Along with abstract colour configurations, it is mainly huts, barns and sheds that Olaf Quantius uses as motifs in his work. These are buildings that commonly attract little interest, marginal entities that, with the aid of an artistic interpretation, are brought to renewed consideration and attention. Quantius’ works are not one-offs, but parts of groups. In these series with in most cases suggestive titles, the artist does not concentrate on minimal variations on a pictorial theme, once it has been found. Instead, the selected subjects give him repeated opportunities to address fundamental issues and observations on the nature of things, of being and of painting itself.

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  • Primal States, First Men

    Christoph Peters

    Translation from German by J.W. Gabriel

     

    Let’s say nothing exists; as always before the beginning, there is nothingness, only empty desert, a scene in an absent light that knows no darkness, and above this, hovering states of unknown things.

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  • Thouhgt on Huts and Patches

    Roland Nachtigäller

    Translation from German by Tim Chafer

     

    […] When Olaf Quantius now applies his scraps, which in the early years started out on ungrounded and often found cotton remnants, to the felt of a woollen blanket, he succeeds in achieving a separate realities. With a format adapted entirely to human dimensions, in art history almost inseparably associated with Joseph Beuys and defined anthropologically as a source of warmth and as the simplest architectural material, woollen blankets serve in his works as a bridge between minimalist gesture and emotional charging. In this dualism, the scraps painted on them have a dual function. Whereas the materialization of a protective location dissolves in their presence, they also mark at the same time the irruption of a reality of the Other. In both interpretations, they are the Outside that both deconstructs and transcends the real. This means that the principle of oscillation is retained: the gaze shuttles between near and far, while only being able to focus, both in the concrete and metaphorical sense, for a moment. What remains is productive process of emptying, a clarificatory process of

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  • The Pull of Pictorial Significance

    Johannes Meinhardt

    Translation from German by J.W. Gabriel

     

    […]The situation of painting has become difficult, and confusing into the bargain. By weaving highly diverse, contradictory categories and modes of perception, of objective, abstract, expressive and “realistic” painting, into open networks, Olaf Quantius creates works that no longer enable simple perception, but instead involve the viewer’s eye and mind in insoluble contradictions and exert an enormous pull of significance; he creates paintings of a complexity that provides the viewer with a remarkable experience of intensity. Anyone who is receptive to the many potential modes of perception in play on the one hand, and to the allusions and references in the art on the other, is forced or tempted to devote the highest possible concentration to the diverse, contradictory, significant aspects and moments of the painting, and as a result gains a sense of heightened consciousness and an expanded awareness of self and presence in the world.

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