Ilja Freer
"Through my artworks, I free myself from the common ideas and norms of society how something should be. In my colorful abstract pictures I connect reality with the deviating norm and intuitively create a new perspective on things and forms."
"If you want to stand out from the crowd, you can do it. Then just think differently than the others. You are you and you are different. Do what you love with passion."
"Be wild, rebellious, unusual - be how you want to be and not how others want you to be. Believe in yourself, then you can do anything. To everyone who thinks differently: the rebels, the idealists, the visionaries, the unconventional thinkers, those who don't let themselves be squeezed into a scheme, those who see things differently."
"Look straight around the corner"
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As an artist, I feel a kind of urgent energy that guides me through my work. Safety and routine when proceeding is one option, curiosity and experimentation is the other. My goal is to raise the intensity of the interaction of composition and color to a higher level. I want to explore that anew with every picture. The focus of my work is the material presence of color, its expressiveness and spatial effect. The images are created by juxtaposing, superimposing, removing color or colored surfaces. Each color is related to the one next to it, to the one behind it and to the one above it, and of course to the whole. Color tones intensify, there are dissonances or a different color brings calm back into the composition. Although each color stands alone, it can only achieve its full potential through the interaction of all colors.
The pictorial compositions, which I usually build up in many layers, are not always completely planned, but develop during the painting process, in which the interplay of colour, form and structure plays a decisive role. This also applies to my very reduced and minimalist works.
At the end of this process, the work stands on its own and represents nothing other than itself. That sounds strange at first, but it is important insofar as my works are not an abstraction of an object or a landscape, but only of the color and be painted out of the work process.
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In the eye of the beholder, however, the finished paintings are often seen as abstract objects, forms, landscapes, flowers, animals or people.
Through the interplay of color, light and form, I create space, movement and rhythm in my work.
At the same time, I try not to think too much about color theory and work against the ideas in my head to be open to the spontaneous. I call this the controlled chance. Errors that destroy the picture are a good starting point for new picture ideas.
What's important to me is the thought that I can't reinvent abstraction, it's all been there before. But I can try to find my own point of view with my work.
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