Dénesh Ghyczy German, b. 1970

Bright rooms, unobstructed views and walls made of glass have characterized representative buildings since the beginning of the modern age. Denesh Ghyczy's subtle oil painting traces the light in an almost impressionistic way, when it falls compellingly on the floors and walls of his interiors. Coming from outside and materializing in broad brushstrokes, light is the golden currency of architectural interior design. However, the seduction of its realistic representation is only an external dimension of Denesh Ghyczy's work, often appearing as if having an old master's touch in its structure and subjects. In fact, his Inside Outside series, which started in 2017, is a cheeky exaggeration of a romantic-contemplative gesture towards nature, a long tradition in the arts. Figures stand in the midst of light-flooded interiors, frequently almost as small in scale as Caspar David Friedrich placed them in the immense infinity of his "world-soul" landscapes. In Ghyczy's, similarly thoroughly composed, but spring-bright, enticing pictures, people are mostly represented seen from behind, placed between the skies and strips of landscape where melancholy glides into the immeasurable. The works of this contemporary painter, who runs his studio near Vienna, refers, just like Friedrich's icons of Romanticism, to the tragically unattainable longing for a union of all opposites. Gridded by window struts and glass joints, we look at what is outside as if looking at a picture. Haven't we thereby degraded nature to a powerless and ineffective object of contemplation? Hasn't it become a mere purveyor of visual qualities such as light and color? The window, as Ghyczy shows in his metaphorically convincing work, is ultimately only a compromise between the contemplative closeness to nature and our need for protection, between the decorative presence of the landscape and its safe distance, and thus in a general way, like painting itself.