An interview with Dirk Salz

23.10.2021

An interview with Dirk Salz

"It’s certainly important to me as a painter to create something that wasn’t there before and which I hope will make the world a better place at the end of the day."

It’s certainly important to me as a painter to create something that wasn’t there before and which I hope will make the world a better place at the end of the day. Contrasts that define one another are absolutely a part of my work. We see them in nature and the world around us, because everywhere you look there are aspects, there are contrasts, that are inconceivable without one another. Light and darkness, night and day, love and hate, no matter what you picture, these are things which cannot exist without one another. Likewise, I always try to pick up on certain things in my painting and contrast them against one another to create this suspense. Unlike a lot of my contemporaries, I’m an early bird. By that I mean I get up in the morning and cycle to the studio (weather permitting). I’m normally the first to arrive here. The first thing I do is look at what we managed to do the day before – what has become of it. I do the drafts in the afternoon, in the evening or first thing in the morning. Often even at the weekend. I am more creative in moments of calmness, so just after waking up, sometimes before breakfast, usually at the weekend – I even get new ideas lying daydreaming in bed!

First and foremost, I see myself as a painter and consider what I do painting. My approach is always from the perspective of a painter, not of a sculptor, so it’s less about the form and actually always about the painting. The lines do of course become blurred. I play with these boundaries. It’s something I love to do, to question things. And to create certain effects, so that I break the limits of two dimensions and place pieces of glass in the room, for example, to turn what I have otherwise done in two dimensions – painted on the surface, on a medium – into more of a sculpture or object. Having said that, what I do is I paint.

Essentially, unlike other painters who had a different approach, my painting is not about somehow getting myself in there. That’s why you have the flat surface and no brushstroke, nothing in the painting to show my authorship, because to me it’s not about putting myself in there and showing myself, but rather about giving viewers the opportunity to see themselves, to reflect – for my part, to reflect their souls, so to speak. In principle, the composition is hidden behind the reflection. That is to say, the image does not reveal itself. Ultimately, it remains interesting this way because the viewer always has to unlock it again and everyone does it differently to their own way. A different size, a different distance, a different time of day – all of this makes the viewer to always see a different image. The reflection adds a complexity which effectively destroys the composition that was created, the relationship between line and surface and colour – but at the same time creates something new which to me is also not controllable, but as a result it creates a dynamic picture concept.

The synthetic resin was really a choice which resulted from the painting itself. I wanted to create something that seemed objective at first glance, something that is initially taken to have been created by a machine, to be extreme, which, when looked at more closely and sampled, experienced, maybe even felt, turns out not to have been created by a machine, but is ultimately a painting.

I am trying to create a situation that cannot be explained, but where you feel something almost like – yes, let’s call it magic. Or even a certain love. Whatever! It is something that occurs between the viewer and the work. It is a stated goal. What I actually want is to effectively establish a dialogue, some sort of connection between the work and the viewer that can’t be comprehended. That is what I am trying to accomplish. It doesn’t always work, but sometimes it does. I want to create something which cannot be named or determined, simply because it can’t be captured. It remains open, it does not show itself completely.