The Berlin artist Rainer Splitt (1963, DE) is all about observation, experiment and the emotional power of color. The flow of the paint, its specific shape and spaceforming characteristics are the core of his artistic research. How can paint succeed in painting itself, regardless of any desire for expression and independent of a prefigured idea? What consequences does this have for our expectations of the image?
Splitt pours the paint onto the surface, uplifts the pictural plane and lets the paint run vertically: Expansion, coherence and gravity form an astonishingly precise form, a colorful disegno that paradoxically reverses our expectation on how liquids move and our idea of a drop. On reflective surfaces, the color deletes the environment reflected in the image - on reflecting paint we recognize our colored self in the poured shape. Thus the viewer is not just a part of the picture; the image becomes a reflection level of one's own perception.