Following a week that modulated between the trivial and the tragic, we turn our attention to a brief excerpt from Per Espen Stoknes’ remarkable Landscapes of Soul, dating from 1996, in which he tracks various myths of apocalypse, wildness and the city through history and human psychology.
We are grateful to DP correspondent Allen S. Weiss for directing our gaze to the work of Herbert Pföstl; two images below.
WILL NEVER RETURN
THE SKY STILL FARTHER AWAY
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Pföstl offers the following vita:
painter of animals, plants, and saints.
what is collected here in fields of broken color, excavated text, and tones of concealment are signs and relics; ordered as paper memorials to stones and plants, to animals and saints.
emblems of landscapes and lives gone from this world. they are laid side by side with care, almost botanically, and mostly on paper that is rarely larger than a page in an old book.
there is no wish to simulate or eclipse nature. embracing a slow alchemy of things, in drama without movement, these histories of last walks, epiphanies, and petitions are fragmentary by principle; their harmonies structured in silence.
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We will explore his exceptional body of work more thoroughly in a future DP.
