About the painting of STEPHANIE von FÜRSTENBERG
Stephanie’s paintings enchant us with their poetry of luminous colors.
The artist calls her paintings ‘The Magic Flute of the Stars’, ‘Rigoletto’ or ‘Symphonies of the Haze’. These tuneful titles create a bridge to the world of music. In reality, the artist is tracing the sound of the colors.
Is it allowed to search for something concrete in these non-objective oeuvres? Why not? Where the blue-green colors of the sea meet the pink evening skies, one may sense – with a little bit of imagination – the line of the horizon and a delicate scenic impression.
In the end however, these associations will lead to an intellectual aside. For, these paintings do not want to represent anything external. It is the inner images that emerge here.
“I do not think about anything when I paint. I see colors’, said famous painter Paul Cézanne once upon a time.
Stephanie von Fürstenberg expresses this in a very similar way, when she says: “The color does what it wants. It leads my hands. This is how I feel colors.”
On her canvases, colors develop a life of their own. Everything is color, light, motion, airiness, haze and sky. This artist with a life-affirming attitude typically omits earthly heaviness and dark shadows. It is obvious that the liberation of color has turned into an affair of the heart. Her hues of red, blue and yellow therefore do not describe a specific object; they live and shine all by themselves. Great optimism emerges from these paintings, and a dream of the weightlessness of the sky which is expressed in many a painting as a glance into the (inner or outer) cosmos, comes true.
Despite the luminosity of colors, there is a self-confident calmness above these paintings.
Very essential things become the main subjects: The elementary powers of color and the elements, the search for nativeness and purity – and last but not least the belief in beauty and esthetics.
These paintings succeed because of the courage of the artist who has confidence in her intuition.
Klaus Sebastian 2016
