In artistic terms, as well as in his professional life, Christoph Pauschenwein has taken his own visionary paths: in addition to drawing and painting, digital art is a form of expression, which fascinates and challenges him.
In the center of Pauschenwein’s work stands the human being, with its experience, sensations and feelings. His Planets, too, are always connected with emotions. These Planets are fascinating, luminous, almost enraptured celestial bodies, which -thanks to the digital possibilities and their placement in light boxes- take on fluffy characters, tempting the viewer to touch them. On one hand, this group of works shows a certain relation to Pop and Op Art. On the other, it is also reminiscent of colored, macroscopic, scientific photographs.
The tension arising between playfulness and exuberance, and the idea of having a close-up view of an organic being before one‘s eyes is an effect, which Pauschenwein uses with full intention. In contrast, his linear computer images with their structural undulations and differentiated color tonalities belong to the tradition of Constructive and Concrete Art. With mathematical calculation and programmed chaos known to be close to each other, Pauschenwein always chooses the ordering structure: the moving, harmonious lines and colors arousing emotions of almost spherical dimension. They are vibrations and sounds of a visual kind, evoking fine musical compositions. The Planets fit perfectly into this sounding, moving universe: a spatial effect and resonance emerges in the interactions of these two different groups of the artist‘s works.
Pauschenwein is genuinely interested in the representation of space and its different dimensions. Using constructive and digital art, he explores it in the most intensive manner. He is impressed by artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, paving the way to Modernism with their invention of abstraction through free compositions of lines or patches of color. The explosive power of no longer being bound to the earlier mimetic-figurative tradition revolutionizing art in the early 20th century, appeals to him very much.
For someone like Pauschenwein, who has a great affinity for a narrative, as it is known for example in comics, renouncing visible reality from the outset as part of the creative process was key. He found the Planets through his own cartoons with monster creatures, whose specific character plays an important role. Having dealt with this fictitious world for a longer amount of time, he conceived the obvious idea of creating planets to accompany it. For him, they are also to be understood as something alive - the threedimensional aspect, the „hairy texture“, their inner luminosity and the differentiated color tonalities make these celestial bodies appear essential. Involuntary, they arouse feelings of attraction, fascination and astonishment.
