IMPRESSIONS

It is a fact: on the island of Crete, Eugen Hunziker seems to have found a privileged place of inspiration for his art. Through his works, he shows a deep and intimate bond - a true expression of love - for its light, the sky and the nature, and most of all for the sea that in its richest variations has offered endless opportunities for inedited depictions, many a time renewed.

Since many seasons, during his extended stays in the Aegean Sea, pictorial cycles have developed in the spirit of great limpidity and have become the pattern of a personal stylistic structure, fluid pictures that live on light and variegate coloured touches, along with signs and painter's language that flow unchallenged on paper that the artist then fixes on boards.

In these alchemies, he submits graceful journeys where rational construction of the image and the fortuitousness of colour spreading on smooth paper alternate autonomously, pictorial phrases that have their origin both in vibrant overlapping and in subtractions resulting from scratches and removals of coats of paint, these gestures being exclusively driven by feelings caused by momentary emotions. And so, this year too, the artist has come back from Plakias with 24 boards that reflect the sequence of the Greek alphabet from Alpha to Omega.

The artist thereby reverts to a theme already developed in 1970, thus showing his intention to rethink a distant approach in a new period of his life, almost as if he wanted to underline certain themes and reference points that have remained unchanged in time. It is no coincidence that the artist has gathered these plates under the definition of "Reflections", and that is when the act of painting rises to a metaphysic dimension in balance between the atmosphere of the present and the memories.

Compared to that first cycle - lost because destroyed - we see a sort of emancipation from the graphic sign of single letters towards an indeed informal description, that is also impressionistic in its care for the atmospheric rendering of the natural details. Like in the paintings of the early romanticism - we are thinking of Turner - a heroic, lofty message streams into the picture and confronts the beholder with wider visions in which he enjoys to wander and lose his way. Nothing distracts form the overall picture, no anecdote or detail that leads back to a narration. Hunziker lays out for us an accomplishment set on the border of abstraction.

Paolo Blendinger, Torricella, August 20, 2013.
(English by Alberto Ferrari)