In his singular paintings, Niklaus Manuel Güdel (*1988 in Delémont, Switzerland) assigns a void to the actual pictorial subject. The people or animals he portrays are merely roughly outlined. Yet we recognize the shapes—our brain has stored countless illustrations and figures and is trained to immediately fill in any visual absence, any empty area in our field of vision. Yet a “blind spot” of this kind causes us to pause and in the end also stands for the unnamable, the unrepresentable essence of every living being.
Güdel’s painterly gesture and his artistic strategy have earned him international recognition. His most recent works, the Comme un blanc series, are particularly interesting: attesting to the terrors of war by not depicting them and not showing the traces they leave behind is a moving symbol for the impossibility of expressing the experienced horror.