Overlooking the mountains and valleys of Mount Ventoux in the Alps, the poet Petrarch concludes that images, metaphors and moods inspired by landscapes are the essence of human knowledge. The artist Mocx explores “his landscapes” by means of painting.
The large-sized works take the eye of the beholder from majestic mountain tops, impassable ridges and unformed hills, often separated by deep calderas or waters, to landscapes of colour traces.
In Mocx’ seemingly endless and deserted vastness there may be a swing, a xed on a sca old or a sheer overhang. There may be a planted ower, a rope tightened between two wooden stakes, an unending path melting into the horizon. Mankind has left its traces. Man-made objects, residues and cultural relicts are combined with natural elements. With his compositions of abstract coloured space and thoroughly shaped details Mocx broaches the issue of nativeness and an environment modelled by culture.
With his vantage point, where seemingly insurmountable canyons and abysses prevent to go any further, Mocx succeeds in making the observer to pause and to contemplate.
A short disorientation, a hardly noticeable displacement of the senses leads to a deceleration of vision. The appearance of partly distorted objects and gures are related to thoughts, memories and feelings and thus open up the window to a “landscape within”. The outside world becomes an insight.
Thus Mocx’ painted landscapes serve as catalytic tool for achieving self consciousness, very much in the sense of Saint Augustine: „And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not. “
In painting the autodidact Mocx has found a language beyond verbalisation. His works open up the path to a in-between-world (Zwischenwelt), which, as Paul Klee states “exists between the worlds our senses perceive”.
- @mocx_dabbert
