Thoughts & Insights

OUBEY called his computer-based “painting with light”, created between 1988 and 1993, “PhotonPainting”. For him it was less a technique than an idea, a philosophy: the idea of painting with light.

White-hot bursts of flame flash in the night as the “Stardust” lifts off in the midst of a pillar of fire, leaving the earth behind. Its destination is the moon. Chief pilot and leader of the expedition of the “Stardust” is a major from the US Space Force. His name: PERRY RHODAN!

The planetary landscapes in the expanses of the universe, with their cold deserts, gigantic methane lakes, oceans hidden under ice, and much more that we cannot yet even image today, will still astonish us.

Why is it, in order to understand OUBEYs art and hence the MINDKISS Project, so important to be devoted to the creation of, and general comprehension of our universe? OUBEY himself once gave an answer to this question:

“The insatiable hunger for knowledege; the burning passion to blaze new trails and overturn old points of view; the wish to find out where we come from …

Even before the Hubble Telescope set off on its journey into the depths of outer space and long before its first fantastic images of star nebula and galaxies were received on earth, in the eighties of the last century OUBEY painted a series of pictures, to which one of the five volumes of the MINDKISS book is dedicated. This volume is entitled “The Cosmos in the Mind as the Primal Ground of Art”.

Several days ago, on 6 August, the German-French television program ARTE devoted an entire thematic day to the exploration of space. It was a huge amount of first-hand information on this topic, for more than eight hours, such as one rarely receives delivered like this.

A visitor to OUBEY’s studio some years ago, looked silently for some time and then said: “These pictures are like archaeological excavations into the future.”

In the last blog post I mentally bridged the distance between the discovery of cave drawings created over 30,000 years ago and the discovery of OUBEY’s pictures, which were created in the last thirty years.

Direct access to art is found in emotion. “With all the intellectual considerations that may be behind it, ultimately the emotion is crucial.” (OUBEY).

There are no interpretations or scientific classifications for OUBEYs pictures.

… is the title of one of the pioneering books by Ilya Prigogine, the Belgian-Russian winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry, which was first published in 1977.