Dieter Laue

Findings
D.r Gerhard Kolberg, Curator Modern Art, Museum Ludwig Cologne on Dieter Laue’s painting:
The paintings of Cologne painter Dieter Laue, painted with colours enriched with fillers such as graphite, marble powder and Kassel brown, often look like old leather. They are interspersed with spider-like craquelé structures, which the artist creates by mixing acrylic paint as a binder. This is because the different parts of the material in the colour mixture repel each other. In this way, a painterly creative process takes place that is based to a considerable extent on the (guided) coincidence of écriture automatique.

So there is also something to discover in Laue’s informal pictorial worlds that lies not so much in the picture as in the psyche of the viewer. Just as the landscape of the human soul is rich in aspects, Dieter Laue’s pictures are painted in such a multi-layered way. In them, an intensive and multifaceted shaping with matter took place, which is comprehensibly effective in the pictures.

A creative process of creation took place, which essentially consisted of the painter’s spontaneous reactions to what he had just painted. The completion of the work depended on the sensation. Brown-red or grey-brown zones of colour mix and form themselves into fields, into bizarre structures, into momentarily perceptible spatial depths perceivable depths of space or cave-like vistas. There is a hint of landscape. But it is all imagination! Because Such associations are quickly destroyed when one looks again or thinks differently. And these compositions of colourful, tonal spots, forms and surfaces, which the artist dissolves painterly and which sometimes suggest non-existent pictorial spaces – for Lau’s work is a work of art.

For Laue’s compositions are first and foremost paintings on and for the surface – fibrous, tremulous net structures of fine lines and craquelés are superimposed. Mostly bright, like fine veins or roots, they infuse the layered colour matter with mysterious life. The colour forms in Laue’s most recent paintings are vague, rather suggested. They resemble shadowy memories of once clearly delineated archetypes. Numerous coloured intermediate tones convey this painterly obscurity, which, moreover, through coloured trickles and dripping traces of the formative moment, promote the deliberately informal character of the paintings. As already mentioned, Dieter Laue’s paintings are an interlocking and interweaving of structures of various kinds, shapes and sizes. Almost like a jigsaw puzzle: individual, large and small forms, spots and shapes of different colours visually pull together to form larger shapes – and these pull together again to form an overall composition. This kind of spontaneous painting also brings movement to Laue’s pictures, which often remain sensually in a kind of twilight state because of their broken colours. But this is precisely the situation in which phenomena are seen. For example, formal phenomena that are not supposed to represent anything, but are something. Even if it is only painting.