Before taking a winter break at the end of 2025, I want to introduce a new series that I touched on in my last article about dreams. The title, “Before I Gotta Go,” borrows from a song. [1]
I have dedicated the year 2025 primarily to minimalism. I think of the change through yin and yang: after a period of strict reduction, I felt drawn towards opulence. This counter-movement is clearly visible in my new series on dreams and their surreal components.
Although I am often my own harshest critic, I am grateful that I not only keep managing to develop new techniques, but that I can also improve them fairly well and use them for what I want to express.
Before I Gotta Go: A Thank You
Fittingly towards the end of the year, I would like to thank you for all the attention, loyalty, and encouraging feedback. Writing this journal helps me to order my own thoughts. But it is only through you, the readers, that I experience the resonance that gives meaning to my work—however imperfect it may be.
A Dialogue on TV
At the time of writing in December 2025, there was also a special appointment ahead: a modest TV appearance. Professor Wolfgang Kubin, whom I have mentioned here a few times, was celebrating his 80th birthday. A celebration was planned for the occasion, and Wolfgang wished for the two of us to appear in a kind of dialogue.
My topic suggestion “Dot and Void” delighted him. I wondered what an audience might take from this philosophical excursion. The plan was to record the celebration for television, with invited guests present. Preparing the dialogue also gave me a reason to put my ideas into clearer words for a later article.
The Dream as an Old and New Theme
But back to art. As mentioned at the beginning, I want to show some of my latest works. The subject of “dreams” has accompanied me since my youth. As an autodidact, my approach back then was still impetuous and the execution correspondingly amateurish. One of my first pictures depicted a dream I had actually dreamt.
Looking back, that approach no longer satisfies me. I often feel the same about dream paintings by artists I otherwise admire. Why? Because strictly speaking, they are illustrations. At best, they reflect an imagined dream world, similar to a descriptive short story or an etching from the 19th century, like in this collage I did many years ago.
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams strongly influenced me in my youth; later, I became interested in C. G. Jung and his idea of archetypes. These were influences on my thinking, rather than instructions for painting. The works I want to show now move away from the depiction of a dream’s events.
The Search for the Right Technique
When I returned to the subject of dreams in late 2025, I was still busy with my series on black natural paper. With this picture, I effectively “exited” that series:
I soon found this technique too rigid and too graphic for the dream images I wanted to make.
So I tried something else: Oil. Actually, my main concern was to transfer my progress in the area of minimalism to oil painting. As in much of my work, I was thinking about Daoism, with the opposing pair “sparse versus opulent” in the foreground.
Oneiric Divide
The next attempt approached the core of the matter much better. I already mentioned the painting in my last article: Don’t Let the Old Man In.
This attempt helped me clarify what I wanted: to paint what a dream leaves behind, rather than the events within it. I think of the result as a Zen moment—a vague recollection or a compressed feeling, caught before it disappears. That is my artistic association, not a definition of Zen.
It is about a mixture of feeling, mood, and reflection.
This picture ties in with an earlier series, which I discuss in Dreamtellers and which also included works like these ones:
What connects the two concepts? A new approach to Surrealism. It is fundamentally abstract but contains areas that appear almost photographic, thus incorporating the “sur-real” (the beyond-real). The goal is to highlight the essence of dreams without telling a story.
The Disneyfication of Dreams
We live in a time when the subject of dreams is often “Disneyfied.” Similar to some animated films, images are used that represent nothing more than concentrated banality and try to please everyone in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. I find this smoothing away of strangeness especially troubling in images made for children. Some AI-generated “dream worlds” give me the same impression: instantly recognizable fantasy that leaves little room for the disquiet or ambiguity of an actual dream.
When we have had a “beautiful” dream—for example about a loved one—we wake up in a good mood that carries us through the day. But there is the other kind of dream to which I want to dedicate myself in this part of the new series: The dreams that leave us waking up disturbed.
The Anatomy of a Nightmare
It is about dreams that have touched something deep inside us. Dreams that leave us feeling paralysed. Although nightmares often have a plot, we often only remember fragments: A red car rushing towards us while we are unable to step aside.
If one frees these scenes from their objecthood (the car, the street), what remains is the pure “feeling” of oppression and energy.
This is the core of my attempts: To condense. I deliberately renounce “beauty” and try instead to compress the earthy, the intangible, and the threatening.
I came closest to my aspiration in a work that is not quite finished yet. But a detail from it reflects the mood perfectly:
Before I Gotta Go…
…I wish you all the very best for 2026!
For 2026, I had in mind a saying often attributed to one of my favourite humorists, Karl Valentin:
“May it not get as bad as it already is.” (My English translation.)
Footnotes
[1] I adapted the title of this article from Courtney Barnett, from her song: Before You Gotta Go
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