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On a recent visit to an exhibition in Berlin’s Alte Münze – the former State Mint – I had an experience of art of a kind I’ve never known before. On the four walls of a darkened room animated large-scale video projections of the paintings of famous artists were playing. Pictures by Van Gogh, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet and other artists were moving all around me. Video projections instead of the original works – can this really be good, I wondered.

OUBEYs works were uncharted territory at the time of his death. Neither an art expert nor another artist nor anybody else had ever commented on them – not even OUBEY himself. He never offered any explanations of his work. 

In a market the price of a commodity is mainly set by the relationship of supply and demand. The more people wish to possess an item the more the seller can ask for it – quite independently of whatever material value the item may have.

"It took me four years to paint like Raffael but a whole lifetime to paint like a child again."

This was said by no one less than Pablo Picasso. Even though his paintings had long been ranked by the art world among the best ever painted, learning to paint like a child was apparently a major concern of his.

Just watch children at play. In their games they create their own private world. We grown-ups perhaps don’t take this seriously and think “oh, they’re just playing”.

If we experience and enjoy a work of art through the free play of emotion, the distance between the artist and the outside world can be reduced to the lowest common denominator for this moment of perception.

That this can also function across great stretches of time is amazing yet entirely possible. 

I always was, and still continue to be, continuously astonished, impressed and thrilled by what other people who encounter original paintings by OUBEY discover in them.