Atelier "Belcanto"

Exposição "Vibrações Coloridas" - 5th of September 2020, Estoril

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"Natureza Eterna" - 10th-23th of September 2019, Lisbon

Paisagens e Imaginações Abstractas - 4th of August 2018, 17h00

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Kunstverein Elmshorn, Germany - 13th of May - 3rd of June 2018

"...as cores soam" - 17th of March 2018, 16h00 - Galeria Porto Oriental

Biographical Notes

Claus von Oertzen lives and works in Lisbon and Hamburg. The artistic project of the painter, born in Hamburg, aims at visualizing the emotions raised by classical music. Aspects related to nature are inherent to his abstract work.

His studies at the "Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst" in his hometown marked the artist decisively. The artist's works are now in private and public collections.

In the body of sounds

By Prof. Dr. Maria Leonor Barbosa Soares, FLUP – Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto

Nature..

I understand Claus von Oertzen’s painting as a synthesis of two fundamental experiences in confrontation:

- The singing, revealing of the spaces of sound, resonances and sound sensations in one’s body, breathing in dialogue with something external to its own reality, the agreed and authorial musical vocabulary - the body sensed as the instrument of an inconspicuous construction, the music;

- The landscape design and garden project, multisensory meeting with nature and the transience in different time scales, combining poetic and pragmatic textures in the construction of sensitive spaces - the body as a tool of visible constructions, tangible, environments/paths.

..Wildness..

Intensifying the valuation of each particular moment as well as life as an experience, the work performed with nature and in nature, will have contributed to a reassessment of the relationship with art.

Painting reveals itself then, as a combination and integration process. It materializes the will of non-submission to conditions and circumstances external to the painter. The images appear as musical compositions recorded in a notation system in which color is the basic element. Not being representations, they are constructions of feelings: sounds-colors.

In Pintura Sonora, the embodiment of sound, which the singing experience implied as an individual cognitive process, now involves the viewer through the physicality of the work.

..Music in my ears..

Syncopes or hauls of “paletteknifeings” and juxtaposition of layers of paint (particularly in the oils), fusion of colour plans, stain disruption and intensification of the intervals/silences, echoes and extensions of shades, shrillness of drippings, tonal or linear dissonances... they are notations that each observer identifies and articulates in a unique and different way each time, creating a new composition.

The awareness of this unique interaction with the composition, at a visual level, consequently directs its attention to the process of repossession of sounds and to the selection, relativization and organization criteria which model the interpretation of the sound sensations.

Maria Leonor Barbosa Soares

..and in my eyes

Painting is defined as a unique field of freedom to Claus von Oertzen: while non-landscape opens space to all paths taken and includes all sounds understood; establishes spatial relationships that jut out of the canvas background or paper through continuous crossing of auditory-visual-auditory-visual sensory fields..., placing new questions; he constitutes himself as a basis for reflection on the perception of time, rhythms and intensities of all experiences.

Maria Leonor Barbosa Soares

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

Orhan Pamuk, "My Name is Red"

Welcome

Welcome and thank you for taking time to visit my website. I tried to give you a short impression of my work and my exhibitions in Germany and Portugal.

Please have a look around the site and drop me an email on your thoughts or make a short entry in our guestbook. I’m also keen to hear of other issues that you think I should be looking into.

You can find a Portuguese version of the main chapters also here or in the menu on top of the site. Hope to hear from you soon, até em breve,

Yours,

Claus von Oertzen