Vision of Hi-Definition in the Work of Joachim Oettli

What Henry James called the “stream of consciousness” to allude to a series of mental states, transient events which are either successive or may overlap or are simultaneous. These mental states interact and initiate mental dispositions which Joachim Oettli realizes  in his works. And the constant shifting in the intensities of such dispositions underlies the dramatic tensions in his paintings. Each work, realized with restraint, dignity, and not a small amount of visual poetry can be seen as an exemplification of transformation, psychic, or spiritual.

Circle O’ Life, for example, serves as a perfect introduction to the artist’s vision. It is made in accordance with Oettli’s fascinating signature technique in which acrylic is applied ground to the plexiglas pictorial surface. The primary drama in his work is in the oscillation between a brightly colored hovering circle form which serves as the center of the painting and the transparent energy patterns which act as both a “birthing” place and “berthing” area.

By this gentle play of words I mean to allude to Oettli’s deft compositional technique of punctuating space with areas which have a liminal hold on the imagination. These areas are strongly suggestive because of their ambiguousness: they lock and envelop interior forms while simultaneously acting as a nesting area for those interiorized areas to incubate. This the dramatic tension which is sensed in this painting is the analogy which one might make between an internal figure about to emerge, set apart from external circumstances yet somehow bound up and in sharp opposition to its host.

This interplay of oppositional, yet strangely symbiotic relations between foregrounded forms and midground ones continues in O’ Chaos. In several of Oettli’s paintings mental dispositions are not so much placed in opposition to one another but are instead considered as equivalent or simultaneous, even while keeping intact oppositional qualities which serve to heighten the dramatic impulse which courses through each work. Here the mood of the works is that of harmonious unfolding rather than of a jarring coming-into-being.

Joachim Oettli’s invention of forms, textures, and colors becomes a pictorial method that is sufficiently expeditious to draw forth ideas from the spectator’s mind while using the power of association. Thus, a complex process of interaction between making and matching, suggestion and projection, takes place every time the eye and mind of the beholder confronts Oettli’s configurations and their titles. The careful study of shadows of natural objects and their masses is keenly sensed in the complex work as is the artist’s superb design sense.

The painting Out of Love shows the artists remarkable ability to move from pure abstraction to figuration. The overall feeling tone in this painting is that of solemnity suffused with inner radiance. Worlds of different order, those of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic seem to alternate and shift their positions in order to unveil hidden worlds which lie the veil of illusion which has been thrust aside.

Joachim Oettli is an innovator, not simply a practitioner of tried and true forms. He articulates the world through the calculated unpredictability of his paintings. These works, in turn, produce ideational schema that triggers the imagination and complex emotional worlds which compels the mind and infuses the spirit of the viewer in equal measure.