The Swiss painter Conrad Jon Godly makes us marvel at his mountain paintings. Colour captured with a brush on canvas builds up, is brought powerfully to the foreground and brings all its different sensations before the viewer's eyes. Godly skilfully brings the theme of the mountain into the present day, uniting in it the entire evolution of the sublime, but also of the technique of painting. The oil paint is applied thickly, is brought into form pastos; the mountain thus acquires a three-dimensionality that is reminiscent of sculpture. Applying the paint in an act of meditative speed diametrically opposes the process of creating massive mountain formations. There is no pausing during the painting process, no stepping back, no effect at a distance. It is a single dynamic act of painting that takes place without any preliminary drawing, without a grid.
If the viewer then engages with the work and gets close to the canvas, what is depicted gives one the feeling of the omnipresent. One is sucked in, visually enters into the formation of the haptic and - to use Jackson Pollock's words - is in the picture. The famous back figure in Caspar David Friedrich's work, which leads the shiver into the vastness, which becomes the set piece of the astonished observer of nature, falls away and gives way to the real observer, the curious visitor. Conrad Jon Godly's mountains function in their sublimity in both small and large formats. The application of the paint contributes to this. With force, the paint is applied and then removed again, rocks are formed, take on dimensions and unite in a tectonic feel. The thickly applied oil paint never dries out completely, a fact that makes one think of the violence of nature, of magma in the earth's interior.
Conrad Jon Godly: "My painting is never about depiction, be it a mountain, the sea or nature - rather I am interested in the essence and energy of things and nature. How can I bring this onto my canvas? That is the challenge I face as a painter. The immense power of the mountains, of nature par excellence, puts us humans in our place and shows us how insignificant and small we are. If you move often enough in nature, a self-reflection automatically sets in."
