Fernisering – Christian Achenbach: Diotima

Achenbach uses the visual elements of landscape painting to explore states of transition. Painting from a place of intuitive registration, he allows organic lines, geometric forms, and colour gradients to unfold, reflecting a deep engagement with both material and process. As these meditations on canvas starts flickering, motifs emerge – mountains, suns, moons, trees – only to dissolve again into geometric abstraction. “The motif of landscape for me,” as the artist reflects, “is less about describing a place than offering a starting point for painting. While the shapes in the large vertical painting “Diotima” (2025) obviously depict a coastline of an imagined unknown land, it reminds at the same time of the amplitudes of sound waves.”

Thus, at the core of Achenbach’s practice is the challenge of translating an idea or a fragment of nature into painting or sculpture. His process is based on what he calls “visual structures” - shifts in scale and perspective, repetitions, inversions, tonal variations, chromatic transformations, different textures and surfaces, layers upon layers of oil paint that appear to almost mirror the topographical layering of elements and terrains on a map.

Similarly, the painted glass and steel sculpture in the centre of the exhibition, “Untitled (Sphere),” continues Achenbach’s alphabet series of sculptures, reproducing colours and patterns of his paintings while conceptually imitating celestial spheres.

This interplay resonates with the poetic sensibility undercurrent in Achenbach’s work, suggesting a rhythm, or, through his phonetic titles, even a sense of narrative. Like poetry - from Greek poēsis, ‘to make’ - the works evoke meaning beyond their representation. Each work carries its own visual logic, its own internal poetry, and thus possibilities, like a map or an imagined landscape, inviting the viewer to both observe and explore – to get lost and found.

Kilde:
Hans Alf Gallery