Nick Oberthaler : In an Expression of the Inexpressible

Description

...

A long silence.
I return to painting, for distraction.

The act of painting, he replies, is at once inevitable and perfectly inexplicable.
The visible world frightens me. I am always escaping – except when I’m front of the canvas.
There should be no models.
At first, my paintings were ridiculous. I used to think that painting meant imitating what I saw in museums.
Such an effort towards life demands the involvement of one’s whole being.

He then tells me that what reaches him in his innermost being strikes him as so strange that he hesitates putting it into words. The moment he wishes to formulate it, he’s so overcome by a feeling of betrayal and futility that he prefers to say nothing.

Words are devastating.
Only the void and the world of silence are immense.


Some minutes later:
It is amazing when you reach the sublime.

We return home. As we are crossing the Pont-Neuf, he grabs my arm with one hand and with the other he takes in the Seine, the bridges and the beauty of the place, in a silent invitation for us to enjoy together the sumptuous light that is just then already dying over the city.

Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde
by Charles Juliet (Academic press, Leiden, 2009)