Oliver Dehn LANDGANG

About

Oliver Dehn paintings are anti traditionalist postures rooted in tradition. They are allegories for the intimate relation between truth and imagination. Dehns' works are a source of imaginative dexterity that provides a container for the aftershock from the processes of painting itself.
Such aftershocks are a confirmation when art reproduces some life event or situation of individual interest, most perceptibly in the chronicles of literature, theater or film. These aftershocks are also present in works that are apparently fixed, a representation, and this is particularly true for painting. Landscapes, still lives, portraits and allegorical motifs have the same imminence and pleasure with visual impression as other media. As in Dehns' work, which carries a truth strengthening of knowledge: the thorough, dark tradition of the brush that searches for a view that conveys a certain attachment to a truth that has its ownnuances and an ecology where it turn out to be uncanny, grotesque, or turns the infinite abstract sovereignty against all the sensations to fashion an expression that materializes a different kind of knowledge, a different kind of truth, not of populace but of the complex architecture and ecology that is an evolution of the practice of painting itself, to mature and allow for freeadjustment of chromatics and motifs.
The incompatibility of truth still remains an open force for exploration in his work ' it forces that upon oneself, when taken seriously. The figurative form with its quest, its fermentation, its mysteriousness, and its sublimity, in the peripheral, a reconciliation with what rests behind the eyes can - in every gamble, in every painting, independent shape, and gesture, Mr. Dehn is skating on the edge of gaining control of ghosts that rest behind his eyes.
Seumas Railbéart Coutts Ph.D.