Both artists concentrate on the essential aspects of their art. In his sculptures made of stainless steel, Corten steel or stone, René Dantes deals with the abstraction and association of human figures or natural structures. In the process, he develops his own formal language by working out the pure form and reducing it to its essentials, to its spirit. The art historian Claudia Baumbusch wrote: “Every encounter with these multi-layered and ambiguous works, which the artist deliberately leaves in a state of suspension rich in associations, becomes a great aesthetic and sensual experience.”
Maria Wallenstål-Schoenberg pursues a similar approach, as she is concerned with the elementary and essential in painting, with the properties of colors, their color tone, their rhythm, and their relationship to neighboring colors as well as their emotion.
The artist goes through a painterly process, forming her colors and layering fields of color painted with oil paint wet on wet until she reaches her powerful, painterly final colors. It is these different layers of color that give the visible color surface its radiance and depth. The colors become the protagonists in her paintings through their mutual interplay.
The expressive color contrasts in Maria Wallenstål-Schoenberg’s works create stimulating color tones, which she makes the central theme of her art. Together with the sculptures by René Dantes, whose forms create an exciting spatial structure, they open up subtle spaces of perception for the viewer and appeal to their emotional level. The challenge here is to reduce them without losing their expressiveness. Maria Wallenstål-Schoenberg and René Dantes succeed in this, as they manage to condense the expressiveness, so to speak, until tension, rhythm and balance manifest themselves with the forcefulness of simplicity. The design elements of surface, line, form and color mean only themselves
and refer to the basic idea that generates them. It is this essential simplicity of structure that gives rise to works of lasting and universal impact, which can be experienced not only out of their time and context.
“Forms and colors are not beautiful in themselves, but rather those that are produced by the will of the soul. There is something secret that lies behind people and things and behind colors and frames, and that reconnects everything with life and the meaningful appearance, that is the beauty I seek.”
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
