Looking at Thomas Geyer's landscape series, one has the comforting feeling, 'I've been here before,' and that's probably because the artist prefers to convey impressions rather than depict real places. His works feel like the silent minutes after the lights have gone out and your eyes creep into the darkness. They are narrative moments that the artist captures in his works with discreet ease between city and countryside, house and forest, lake and bathing ladder. He translates his own impressions and memories into surreal stage sets, creating the playground of our own history. Nature as a refuge is his setting, night an omnipresent stylistic device: blurriness and play of light create a special field of tension between reality and unreality in the artist's pictorial worlds. When darkness falls, it spreads its veil. Slightly blurred, piece by piece the world disappears in the darkness and we ask ourselves: is something less there, just because we can not see it? Dark dream colors mix in transitions from day to night: a strong orange, sometimes a bright blue seem almost garish in contrast to the backdrop. Do they herald the sunrise or sunset?
In the darkness, everything recedes a bit, just like the artist's narration in his landscapes. Yet it is Geyer's play of light and shadow that characterizes the natural scenes into places that invite escape from urban bustle and noise. Human life leaves traces in its surroundings, sometimes as an illuminated window in the darkness, sometimes as a silent guest who only wants to observe. The symbiosis of nature and man in Thomas Geyer's shadowy settings shows us that the dimensions of urban and rural man can be finer than just day or night.
Text by Sonja Gatterwe