Introduction
Daring compositions, striking lighting effects, a stimulating colour concept and, last but not least, a virtuoso, technically brilliant style – all these characteristics define Andreas Wachter's painting. Today, the artist, born in Chemnitz in 1951, can confidently be counted among the outstanding representatives of the »Leipzig School«. In his work, which has grown steadily over four decades, the high standard of drawing typical of Leipzig is combined with an extraordinary colourism of his own. The visual aesthetics of his teachers Arno Rink and Volker Stelzmann gave the young Andreas Wachter his first compass. However, he did not succumb to Arno Rink's allegorical-surreal condensations, nor to Volker Stelzmann's veristic stage scenes of big-city theatre. Instead, he took a different path and anchored his painting in his private life and experiences, in places he travelled to, but above all in the history of painting. Due to his profound curiosity and expertise in art history, the old masters became an indispensable source of inspiration for him in his painting and opened up a seemingly inexhaustible fund of motifs, pictorial formulas and imaginations, but also of valid painterly solutions. In the early 1980s, Andreas Wachter moved with his family to Erlln, a small village on the Freiberger Mulde river near the town of Colditz. He still lives and works there today. However, images of the Mulde valley are rarely found in his work. It almost seems as if the world offers more refuge than his home village on the river, whose deceptive idyll was revealed by the destruction caused by flooding just a few years ago. Unknown terrain, on the other hand, encourages Andreas Wachter to take a closer look and inspires him to create new images. His works take the viewer to Paris and New York, Venice and Florence, Pompeii, the islands of Sylt and Rügen, and the vast expanses of Greenland. Italy in particular is an important travel destination and a key source of inspiration for Wachter's artistic work. The omnipresent simultaneity of Mediterranean landscape, antiquity, Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque is characteristic of his art, always carried by the sound of a pan-European Italianità. Wächter's painting seduces the eye. His exquisite colour palette is one of his great strengths. In glazed layers of colour that glow from within, a dominant yet harmonious colour scheme is enhanced by sharper tones of red, green or yellow, for example. A special lighting technique in the style of Venetian Mannerists or Roman Baroque creates a dramatic chiaroscuro that contrasts light-flooded areas with night-black darkness. In contrast, overly sharp outlines are toned down in favour of a plastic shaping of the objects in the picture. Figures are often only sketched out, appearing in a vague manner. In thinly glazed layers of paint, modelling the volumes with the utmost delicacy, the painter demonstrates, in a breathtaking economy of brushwork reminiscent of Tintoretto, how ‘little’ it takes to create a credible illusion for the eye. Figures and landscapes are the central themes in Wachter's paintings. In scenarios that are sometimes observed, sometimes invented, figures encounter each other, enlivening interiors, street scenes or expansive landscapes of longing with restrained theatricality. They appear introverted, opening up only cautiously, if at all. They often act as if they are strangers to one another in the space, as if they are focused on a hidden dramaturgical goal. Wachter's paintings can be understood as snapshots of a disparate society, yet they are indecipherable and do not lend themselves to visual interpretations. Their secret is above all one thing: this wonderful, sensual and virtuoso painting, celebrating the pictorial knowledge of centuries, always oscillating between illusion and reality.
