On painting and the dialogue between two painters who deviated from oil on canvas to other materials, form and colour.
'What to paint?', was the question the French Philosopher J.F. Lyotard asked in 1988 and what it is that makes what seems so simple and basic into such an intense act in 'presence' and the question of matter, form and colour.

Aurélie Gravas (°1977 FR, lives and works in Brussels) works with oil and different materials on canvas and cardboard. Since a few years she also started to make cut-outs from drawings and paintings.

Johannes Ulrich Kubiak (°1961 D, lives and works in Berlin and Chemnitz) started as a painter with oil on canvas, later his photographic work became known in Germany and the USA as the artist duo Kubiak & Rauch from 1992 till 2002. Today Kubiak paints with aquarelle on paper. The basis of these paintings are still layers of different photographs he makes of architecture, structures and people. In a concentrated and slow process of transparent layers of watercolours the figurations fade into structure and vibrant colour. In his latest works, out the white of the paper emerges each touch of bright colour into a vibrating composition that shows this one present moment where everything holds perfectly together just before it collapses.

Artists: Aurélie Gravas, Johannes Ulrich Kubiak