His Name is Pointer

It may be interesting for some to see how the old and the new generation meet in the following as a small mosaic piece of art that in its own way spans decades: one who spent his youth in Nazi Germany, who experienced war, destruction, rebuilding, prosperity, who has kept in touch with the new generation, who observes, compares, and narrates from a certain distance - and the other who poses questions and utters ideas with the will to interfere, inarguably because he hails from the new and present generation. Painting and poetry as imagination answering imagination - thusly, new questions still spring from old questions and old images give birth to new images!

When I first saw an exhibition by Wolfgang Lettl in 1992 in the Toskanische Säulenhalle in Augsburg, it was as a collection of stories, captured at a point in time chosen by the painter, frozen in their movement and thereby lifted into the synchronic and permanent. Endless possibilities to add a before or after opened up - possibilities that may resemble Lettl's thoughts or contrast them.

What followed was a very personal work in which I did not set myself the goal of putting the secret meaning of the surreal pictures into words, let alone to continue writing poetry about the pictures as the painter would have done if he had not become a painter but a poet - but I tried to capture the essence of the figures appearing in the pictures, their mood, the whole particular life situation then, the colours, the weights, the tension, the whole palette of love, fear, joy, hardship that was mixed into the pictures - and then, starting from the situation depicted, I crafted my own stories out of it.

Many of the great themes of our time can be found in his paintings - the destruction and exploitation of our fellow creatures, the poisoning of the earth, the massification and simultaneous loneliness of people, the speechlessness and domination of numbers, the difficulty of building bridges between states, between woman and man, between the you and the ego.
 

Lettl's surreal narrative style leaves us open to see the images as political proposals, as an ironist's subtle finger-pointing or as a person's personal hardships and despair; it also leaves us open to how we react to them: thoughtfully, laughingly, sadly, affectedly. And so the poems I have written about it over the past three years are nothing other than a sign of my own thoughtfulness, cheerfulness and consternation.

More poems and texts will follow.