Uwe Jahn

Uwe Jahn works with thin acrylic paints in muted, atmospheric chords of colour. All paintings are brightly translucent – like Cézanne’s watercolours. He loves small-format landscape formats or squares. Thus some seem to be still lifes and simply suggest domestic objects, others reveal themselves as landscapes, clusters of earth or clouds. Once he even put a colored house shape in front of a large white picture, onto which a ray of sunlight seems to fall. But he also mistrusts the reality in which he lives and looks for orders that the “elemental spirits” of the Romantics dictate, orders that arise when the wind blows dunes of sand, when a stream dries up, when the shadow of an object becomes visible that remains hidden. The multiplex plate on which he stages such events has to undergo numerous processes. It is covered with thin paint, a chisel rubs off the paint again, new colours appear, finally the board seems to be covered to the edge, again the ceiling is opened – the layers of the surface become more translucent up to that state, which attracts the viewer irresistibly, yes, I would like to say, sucks in, swallows his glances. He loses himself in the paintings as much as the painter managed to forget his own reality in the silence of his studio for a span of time.

(Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Becker)