The art of Clemens Tremmel follows the trace of the thing to be watched. To that end, he has built traps for the eye into his painting from the outset. Early works have rectangular windows, are covered and nailed shut with metal, scratched and torn out, taken apart and reassembled, even charred. Painting should not be limited to the visible is his imperative. The culture of the momentary, our everyday visual culture, reverberates here; in order to see through to what is in back, resistances have to be overcome; we have to see our part into it. In front of Tremmel’s paintings, we become viewers, vaguely sensing a state that is supposed to parallel the artist’s creative process.

It is based on an understanding of nature that is not of this time; it is categorically distinct from the concern for the environment of contemporary art. Tremmel translates the forces of nature into the painterly. There they seem familiar because they have an effect inside us as well. He links to the landscape a visual tradition that these days is essentially left to photography, and he knows how to triumphally juxtapose the rationally restricted oculus of the photographic with the formative principle of painting. In the meanwhile, he has developed painterly modes for it that form an archipelago of the islands that he visits and that have inspired him to do so.