Alf Löhr: Between Chance and Determination

About

New abstract paintings from this London based German artist showcasing the colour, light and translucency of our environment. Löhr's painting at first glance might be historically described as action painting. However, his aesthetic principles are motivated by quite different concerns. He does not aim to produce a fetish finish surface, on compositions seemly free of human production. He is governed by principles of action-reaction, and by a clear set of visual dynamics and vocabulary. His painterly syntax is based on an exquisite dance between chance and determination of visual and emotional differences modulated between transparency, layering, drips, splatters, splashes, opacities, luminosities, hues, and tones, given scalar force and dimensionality. His work is about elementality, but of acts and events rather than form. It is about affective states and emotional experience, about the production of such states, through the means of projection — throwing paint and catching it in midair as it were. Landing somewhere along the line of their arc into being, his paintings never realize being as such, only processes, or events, of becoming. They are neither form or formless, never become resolved in Euclidean space or linear Newtonian time of the everyday we have been trained to believe in, to see without seeing.