Manuel Gras: The crossroad of the painting human

The Crossroad of the Painting Human.

A world existing of matter and light striving for survival has to welcome the shadow. Manuel Gras presents paintings of the Hyperrealist Leunam Sarg. If the human lives, the painter dies.

Private View 14th May 2004 6 o¹clock pm. Exhibition 15th May 2004 to 22nd May 2004-03-11

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Manuel Gras, born on 7th of September 1979 at 9 o¹clock 7 minutes am, lapsed into his passion already in early childhood. Hardly a year went by, in which he didn¹t paint or draw. Peculiarly the letters L.S. can be seen on all his paintings. Formerly maybe only an unconscious caprice, these letters turned out to be part of his destiny. The years passed by and it became more and more clear to the human Manuel Gras, that the painter Leunam Sarg was the more powerful being. When the desire for colour, line, form, light and shadow becomes more relevant than the desire for life, a painter enters the scene of art.

Albeit the young age of both the human and the painter, Manuel Gras is often asked at his exhibition, who of the elderly men actually is the exhibiting artist. The love for detail and an almost criminological investigation of all existing techniques endow Leunam¹s paintings certain seniority. And still he unifies contemporary witnesses of past epochs with the digital language of symbols ­ he does not indicate the digital era to be his special friend, but he has learned to appreciate the extremeness of things.

An ideal of beauty can be antagonised most effectively by supersaturating it. The same has to be done with the picture language of the 21st century, in which art has to fight against being decorative by all means.

No matter if he uses the pencil, charcoal, acryl or the airbrush, Leunam Sarg finds the doorway to the collective unconsciousness.