Burn, Still by Konstantin Déry

About

A slow work process leads to Konstantin Déry´s paintings, and with their intricate motifs taken from nature, the viewer is invited to take them in slowly. By applying the paint with palette knives and small wooden picks, he creates rough surfaces that further increase the intensity evoked by the strong colour harmonies and structural diversity of texture that characterize his paintings. An idiosyncratic liveliness, which also inhabits the uncontrolled flora and the formations of decay, meets the viewer´s eye. It inspires a sensation in the joy of seeing, of visually experiencing, as a symbol of being alive. Viewed up close, the images in Déry´s paintings can dissolve into dynamic abstract structures, only to become all the more sensual, charged with a very inner dynamic, when seen from a certain distance. 

“Burn, Still, the title of the exhibition, may indicate a quiet stream or embers, still aglow. Both are possible interpretations of these pictures which bring together the precision of line as perceived from the outside with a lyrical or dramatic colouring drawn from introspection. The pictures are not the result of a view of the landscape, they are instead an insight into the terrain. And the rules of the terrain, which are embodied by the things passively in it, have been translated into a language of colour, silent flow and poise, dissolution and consolidation, decay and growth. These terms seem pale in comparison with the language of colour in the pictures, these absorbed considerations of terrain, in which the unmistakable trace of a distinctive gaze into the essence of matter emerges; a trace which articulates itself in a silent, never-ending story of colours, lines, surfaces and structures.”

With this paragraph, Esther Kinsky closes her poetic text on Déry´s paintings, which will be available in full length in the exhibition catalogue.