Geschmack der Sommersonnenwende

Geschmack der Sommersonnenwende begins with a sensory paradox: summer has no single taste, yet it can imprint itself upon the body as an unmistakable convergence of light, warmth, colour, sound and movement. The work condenses this state at the moment of its greatest expansion – on the longest day of the year, which already carries the coming change within it.

A luminous yellow field extends across almost the entire canvas, setting the remaining colours under tension. Violet bands reach outward, form loops and return in altered directions. Black lines descend through the layers of colour like elongated bar lines, while turquoise, orange and grid-like fragments introduce shorter, emphatic accents. The composition develops like an open score: repetition, acceleration, interruption and resonance become painterly movements.

Sight, hearing and bodily sensation enter into one another. Colour does not describe the intensity of summer from a distance; it transmits that intensity directly into perception. Within the Fields of Experience, “taste” becomes the expression of an experience that cannot be assigned to a single sense. Summer appears neither as landscape nor as symbol, but as a present fullness that takes hold of the body.

The painting was created in 2024 during the opening of the solo exhibition Dimensionen des Seins at Kulturbunker Köln-Mülheim. In a joint live-painting performance with pianist and composer Roman Nagel, painting and music encountered one another as processes unfolding simultaneously. The music did not accompany the painting process; it determined time, rhythm, acceleration and pause. The surface retains this encounter: every gesture is both a material act and the trace of a heard moment. Geschmack der Sommersonnenwende does not depict summer; it makes its sensory fullness present.