THE PICTURES OF HELMUT PREISS

Art does not expressively develop from scientific laws. Art is not a consequence of experiments whose observations and their conclusions end with a published result which is final. Art does not develop from the primitive sketches of the cave people to the classical period of the Antique Greek to the golden Spirituality of the gothic and from there to the progress of the baroque, where one regarded the gothic as a barbarian art form. Art does not develop as the final product of a scientific of the unexplained as in physics or chemistry. Rather, they are the individual experiments, which are the results of unexpected discoveries. Result, stemming from the Latin ' RE-SULTARE ' meaning jumps back, throws back or recoils, does not pertain to the work of the artist. His work is 'sultare' meaning jumps, throws and dances. For the non-artist, this is often very surprising and sometimes frightening because they come to realize that something has been placed in motion. Helmut Preiss creates art. His vast range of variety, styles, techniques, differences and possibilities are often confusing for those who want to see the whole life's work of an artist pressed into an existing form and to those who believe a Van Gogh is genuine only if it is a flaming yellow sunflower and not a dark night Potato Eater.

back to top ^

HELMUT PREISS THE PAINTER

Pictorial technology is not a problem for Preiss; he doesn't have to think about it. He learns it, he knows it, and he proves it in his pictures. Early in his career, he had painted in the old-masterly style, creating surreal worlds, something which he called 'lyrical naturalism ' until approximately 1991 when he began to feel constricted by this kind of surreal art form. He felt imprisoned by the rules of proportion of naturalism. He wanted more liberty with content, shape and color, and he wanted to create a new art form. This would be born only out of his vast knowledge and mastership, like Picasso who would not have developed his cubism and the translation of his subjects into a newer art form without his vast technical and artistic mastership. Picasso and Braque left cubism, however, to find new ways of expressing themselves. Preiss has developed his new art form from the virtual three-dimensionality of cubism and from the bodiless colorful abstract. Salvador Dali's thesis that he did not paint photographable worlds lost its meaning as it no longer makes sense to compete with the reality of photography. In this computer age, a surreal reality can be created in rapid screen sequence in just a few minutes, as determined in countless films. The surreal virtual ' lyrical realism ' of Helmut Preiss's work was a trick for the eye. The viewer could enjoy an image or recognizable imagery, but in looking closer, would find that he had been deceived.

The viewer has the same experience with Preiss's artwork today, but would be mistaken to regard the form and content in his works as a multi-colored potpourri, because what may appear to the superficial viewer as a play with templates, like a tachist filled form canon, is actually a precise, nearly old masterfully painted detailed work. It has its origins in the work of the marble artists of the cathedral of San Marco in Venice, who cut and arranged the coincidental streaks, color plays and characteristic designs of the noble stones centuries ago; and to the great master paintings of antique Op-Art arranged forms; or to colored intarsia, that appear to be realism but in reality are a provoking of our imaginative power from abstract elements.

back to top ^

COLLAGES

Preiss does not create Collages with tachistic elements as Max Ernst did with his Frottage's and collages. Instead, he utilizes the abrasion of structures, materials and various elements to create new surrealistic picture associations. Here Preiss's art is relative to another time, still telling, but in less fantastical and literal detail, cooler and arranged in the employment of the means. Because Preiss is no magician, but rather a painter, it is accurate, precise industrious work. Accurate meaning, in the sense of word: 'performed with care '. He paints each detail and the whole with the greatest of care from the conception, to the execution and the selection. Along with that care, however, comes the destruction of his works for his collages. Utilizing cut outs from various large, abstract paintings, he creates a work that could never otherwise manifest itself at the time of its original creation. He bears disorder, not in his environment or in his work, but the disorder caused by the adjustments and repeated actions necessary for improvements lost in creative work time; breathing new life into his life's work. This sense of order can be recognized in many of the shapes utilized by Preiss in his art works, particularly squares. Centers not rectangular, pointing upward or to the sides, but related here to the masters of the concrete art, Albers, Bill Max or Victor Vasarely. There is Tromp l'oeuils, the modern trend -- such dissections and new arrangements of picture parts let new life develop. Cells divide resulting in the new life of old forms into new forms and new colors into new compositions; this is how Preiss arranges elements upon earlier elements. The colors Helmut Preiss has chosen for his work of the last decade are always clear, bright and pure in all differentiated variety -- a vast array, reminiscent of the great art luminaries of the 20th Century such as Matisse and the Fauves around 1905, who started the structured fragments collages from bright colored paper cutouts (paper découpés) up to the Decoupage, for example the cycle jazz (1947) of Matisse and of pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, whose realistic realism is sold for the advertisement of lipstick or soup, etc., an unrealistic, anti-naturalistic rendition of reality, which recalls the image of the genuine article -- only to the viewer. Artifice of color is more strongly demanded than the natural. This applies to the sexual attraction of the red point of the belly of a Coral Fish likewise as to the signal colors of the Cosmetic industry with humans. Preiss begins with color so completely purposefully and skillfully, it is important not to become a victim to the subliminal effect and accessibility of his colors.

back to top ^

HELMUT PREISS THE HEAD HUNTER

Helmut Preiss knows about the simultaneousness of the art of all times and all regions. He carries the "Musée Imaginaire" for it like André Malraux, formulated so applicable in his work. Preiss is an educated being of the western culture and civilization of the two continents of Europe and America. But he is also a primitive being, as we all are. One who's natural instincts and needs sublimate from the head hunter, who eats the brain of its respectfully admired powerful enemies, to a picture eater. Important elements in the body of his works are the variations of pictures by other artists -- an artistic phenomenon found throughout the ages. It is the search for the final and true image. The art inherent, longing to lift a tiny corner of the curtain which lies before the last secret. The bronze of the Roman copies, Greek originals, independent works of art with no imitations, the innumerable variations. Salvador Dalí after Millet, painted in order to investigate the secret of its omnipresence, or variations of Velasquez by Pablo Picasso and the variations of Picasso by his contemporaries such as Hockney, among others. Preiss refers to his interpretations as homage's, honors to the great artists and their artistic expression. Preiss formulates his compositions to these works with his strong, concrete-colored and abstract forms, which interpret realistic topics. As in ' Family Looking at a Mondrian ' it sets its forms before the original intention of the artist and increases the tension. Preiss works on these pictures like a great homeopathic medicine man of humanity, with reductions and dilutions -- formulas no longer provable; however, losing nothing which had existed before. Fine-material substrates germinate into his works and release their new reactions. Preiss combines the pure surface and the pure abstraction of colors in his pictures, and thereby, the effect of the forms and the colors which build themselves up in the eye of the viewer and his consciousness, strengthens.

back to top ^

HELMUT PREISS AND THE IDENTITY OF HIS PORTRAITS

Another form of penetration into the artist personality is the haven guessing designs of his portrait art. Helmut Preiss, through his imaginary, attempts to portray the impressions of multiplicity of well-known Photo portraits, coining/shaping, interpreting to figurative. In a time of innumerable and most varied personality pictures in photography and film, up to the constant operational ready level of TV to be documented, Preiss shows us a personality immediately identifiable through the generally valid technical possibilities, to the rapid recognizable bareness, like the Roman Caesar on the coin; Preiss forms the portraits of the great masters.

back to top ^

HELMUT PREISS AND THE MOVEMENT OF THE FLESH

A quantitatively large portion in the graphic work of an artist consists of the nude drawing. It develops, as with Rodin, Gustav Klimt, or Picasso, fast and in infinite variations. Often like a quick sequence of flash photography on a moving model. Preiss can become consumed by his creations, replacing the physical reality of a model's sexuality with pen on paper. In the rich formal vocabulary from naturalism to cubism, the nude varies. The arduous Acrobat of love, not entirely content with the extreme cross-settings Preiss sublimates in his designs. The human ethological theory means that in the prosthesis, meaning the replacement of member masses by tools, only actual people become Homo sapiens. For Preiss, the pencil and the color in the nude drawing are prosthetics. The Erotic sexuality of the actual nude does not play a role; the artist could always fall back on drawing bottles or bowing scarecrows. It is the movement of flesh, which affects the body surface in the change of light and shade and develops a variety of forms, which itched the fingers of the artist since the Renaissance. The few anatomical characteristics of the nude offered to the artist are a rich variation of all artistic possibilities: expressions of longing, sexuality in variations, as with Rodin, Matisse, Picasso, André Masson, Dalí or even Mozart or the movement and seduction of jazz. From the constant occupation with the nude drawing by Preiss, came the birth of the 'nude avant-garde ', a new form of nude drawing. Shape and movement are identifiable -- despite abstraction -- from colors and forms. That which is the surface of the color filled line for Rodin is the form producing line for Matisse and the abstract surface for Helmut Preiss which succeeds to the artist only because of his experience and mastership of nude drawings.

back to top ^

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PICTURE WORLD OF HELMUT PREISS

The picture world of Helmut Preiss has transformed with years of experience, as his life and the environment changed around him or was changed. It was explosive painting in the 70's, and 80's when rock musicians lived on the Cote d'Azur in the sphere of influence of the Ecol de Paris. It was the smooth, artificial picture world of the media, when he achieved success in Los Angeles and in Las Vegas. It is an analytical painting style now vibrating from his canvases, which restrain his strength into strict forms as Matisse did with color, and it is a painting of movement so completely different than those pictorial movements from the wrist or the large gestures of Expression by the likes of Jackson Pollock where movement from the gesture freezes to a snapshot. Preiss captivates the moment of the movement from an expiration of movements. It is the moment after the preceding, which follows for the moment the next movement of expiration. Preiss' ' Mechanical Figures ' are interesting examples, reduced forms, developed from technical translations of arbitrarily combinable elements, pieces of misalignment and spare parts into a whole.

© Gerhard Habarta

back to top ^

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

GERHARD HABARTA

Born 1939 in Vienna, Austria residing in lower Austria
since 1958, actively writing today.

1955, worked in the youth and education.

1958, gallery leader and exhibit coordinator.

1978 curator and organizer of large museum exhibitions and
everyday culture and with works of the classical modern trend in Austria, Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland.

Numerous book catalogs to: Picasso, Dalí, Rodin,
Marino Marini, Henry of Moorlands George Eisler, Alfred Hrdlicka,
fantastic realism and Austrian sculpture.

Work catalog Salvador Dalí diagrams.

Work catalog Salvador Dalí signatures.

1966 to 1971 program leader of the art book program of
a large Viennese publishing house.

1971 publishers of international diagram editions
(among other things euro editions), of sculptures and multiple.

1970 to 1992 newspaper publisher, editor and designer of magazines.

Co-author, author and/or publisher from book publications to the
everyday culture. (Science Fiction, Comic, game west, mode)
contemporary history (worker culture, republic Republic of, living) and art.

1998 publication in Haiku Anthology edition, Colon,

Vienna 1999 Austrian honor cross for science and art 2003

1st Prize in the German Haiku competition, book fair Frankfurt 2003

1996 appeared an extensive publication ART IN VIENNA
AFTER ' 45 (publishing house the apple)

2000 the Collectors Digest of 375 references to Biography and work

2001 the Biography of Ernst Fuchs (publishing house: STYRIA)

2002 over the invention of technology by the woman

2003 references to Biography, Iconography and work

2004 short stories publication in preparation: < ALL LIES > an
encyclopedia of the lies for the adventurous culture and restaurant
historyof Relics and sexuality in religion.

Collectors Digest of references and 1,000 Biographies
unpublished: STRANGE NARRATIONS

back to top ^