When I Make A Representation Of Something,

I First Came Up With The Idea For The Colour-chart Pictures Back In 1966, And My Preoccupation With The Topic Culminated In 1974 With A Painting That Consisted Of 4,096 Colour Fields. Initially I Was Attracted By The Typical Pop Art Aestheticism Of Using Standard Colour-sample Cards; I Preferred The Unartistic, Tasteful And Secular Illustration Of The Different Tones To The Paintings Of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, Etc.

Abstract Pictures Are Fictive Models, Because They Make Visible A Reality That We Can Neither See Nor Describe, But Whose Existence We Can Postulate.

Painting Is Consequently An Almost Blind, Desperate Effort, Like That Of A Person Abandoned, Helpless, In Totally Incomprehensible Surroundings.

The Grey Paintings, For Example, A Painted Grey Surface, Completely Monochromatic - They Come From A Motivation, Or Result From A State, That Was Very Negative. It Has A Lot To Do With Hopelessness, Depression And Such Things. But It Has To Be Turned On Its Head In The End, And Has To Come To A Form Where These Paintings Possess Beauty. And In This Case, It's Not A Carefree Beauty, But Rather A Serious One.

My Landscapes Are Not Only Beautiful, Or Nostalgic, With A Romantic Or Classical Suggestion Of Lost Paradises, But Above All 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I Mean The Glorifying Way We Look At Nature. Nature, Which In All Its Forms Is Always Against Us, Because It Knows No Meaning, No Pity, No Sympathy, Because It Knows Nothing And Is Absolutely Mindless, The Total Antithesis Of Ourselves.