Picture gallery

Eyes

“Eyes work like a magnet”, observes the artist René Mayer, commenting on his image series on that very theme in a succinct way. “There really is nothing else in life that connects so magically as the eyes and leaves behind such lasting impressions, irrespective of whether we look briefly or for longer. Even the shyest person can’t live without eye contact and this very special, even intimate contact always has some sort of impact: moves, touches, engages, arouses emotions, positive, critical, gentle, passionate, negative, leads to affection or rejection. Feelings are inevitably linked to the eye-to-eye situation. That’s the totally fascinating thing about it. And that’s why eye contact was always very important for me. Eyes lead to eyes, connect, disassociate, open everything up or block it off. Eyes are beautiful – human diamonds.”

Picture gallery

Box

A common motif in my paintings in the square, a symbol of limits, restrictions, narrowness or „caste“ My boxes, on the other hand, go beyond the borders. They should open eyes for comprehensive relationships My „thinking inside the box“ is influenced my numerous trips to India, encounters with people who knew how to make the best of their situation by gaining further education; they opened themselves up to what was foreign and people beyond their „caste“. I am sure that we can spend our entire lives in the same „box“. We cannot break out; we can only try to create contacts with other „boxes“. I am involved with the topic of contacts. My pictures are a mirror of our society. They cast a light on you and your environment. Because they include connections and links, contain near and far, envelope contacts, desired and random. I speak of these things in my paintings. I am thereby creating bridges between opposites. This is in the form of colour reflections and colour repetitions. My paintings are between two poles, show both limits as well as width; they also include close „boxes“ and open worlds on the other hand. In my pictures, I emphasise my will to break out from a fixed system and express a desire for openness, affiliation, relationships and a sense of being interlinked with a language of images in a multi-layer, dualistic way.

Picture gallery

The Ephemeral

Beauty and youth are currently held in high esteem. We are obsessed with and ruled by the idea of the perfect body. However, this beautiful dream is soon cut short. In order to appear in the mould of a beauty idol, we willingly accept a regime of spa, sport, fitness programs and beauty foods, which also serves to signal our class affiliation. Only too soon, beauty reveals its fleeting nature, and we are reminded that, ultimately, all is ephemeral and elusive.

Picture gallery

Moving Earth

Water and air are essential to life, and there would be no life without our earth: We depend on all three elements for our existence. The earth is our source of nourishment, it is the birth place of all plants, and it has many faces. There are fields and meadows, deep valleys, airy heights, gen-tle hills, and dark woods that lead to a play of lights. This is an important part of our earth: lights and shadows shape mountains, furrows and folds, craters, plains, deserts, and steppes. The artist’s images symbolize the moving earth, and they reflect cracks and crevices, caves, sharp boundaries, deserts and oases.

Picture gallery

Experiments

Experiments on the large canvas are of essential importance for René Mayer and he treats them with respect. But on smaller canvases like these 55 x 55 cm images, he experiments in a much more relaxed way, with less inhibition, as he says: “shooting right from the hip”. Without a great deal of thought, spontaneously positive and rarely negative, he dives into a broadened horizon that encourages, even forces, new techniques: innovative, carefree colour combinations, graphic reinventions, collages. René Mayer has a wonderful example of this: he integrates a banana leaf or palm leaf into a picture. “Small-format compositions allow all creative experiments – to implement these, try them out, test them and they then often become templates for large pictures”, explains the artist.