*1957 in München, lives and works in Cologne
Their decisiveness and purity place Thomas Deyle‘s images at the very centre of purism […].
His theme is pure colour, which takes shape as monochrome paintings with no image-internal forms. Colour is the subject of his paintings and simultaneously their object in a literal sense. It is presented as a phenomenon both material and immaterial, revealing – in this dialectic – its fundamental qualities as well as its differential ability, which goes beyond all conceptual capacity.
It is possible to understand colour rationally in its pictorial manifestation, and yet it is also a medium of the irrational. It is flat surface but also virtual space; as a pictorial object it is physics, while at the same time opening up the metaphysical aspects of space.
Lothar Romain, translated by Lucinda Rennison
[…]
The colour surface becomes a colour space of seemingly infinite depth. This visualises, among other things, the experience of spatial infinity that Thomas Deyle experienced in 1989 in the vast landscapes of the USA.
The prerequisite for this impressive visualisation of a highly sensitive perception of colour and light is a very deliberate, technically highly complex painting process: almost like ritual exercises, Thomas Deyle uses a plastic roller to apply hundreds, sometimes over 1000 glazing layers of paint to a Plexiglas panel. With increasing overlapping of the almost transparent layers, the colour saturates and thickens towards the centre. By superimposing different shades of colour, uniform, almost imperceptible colour gradients are created. To delimit each next layer of colour, he works with rubber bands stretched flexibly over the picture supports, which are offset according to previously defined spacing parameters. […] Thomas Deyle derives the parameters of his colour layers from parabolas drawn freely in advance and the coordinates calculated from them. The stratifications they determine are documented as columns of numbers on the drawings. The synaesthetically sensitive son of a conductor presents these preparatory and accompanying graphics as ‘scores’, which could be repeated if the interpretation could be changed. […] Thomas Deyle derives the parameters of his colour layers from parabolas drawn freely in advance and coordinates calculated from them. The stratifications they determine are documented as columns of numbers on the drawings. The synaesthetically sensitive son of a conductor presents these preparatory and accompanying graphics as ‘scores’, which could be repeated if the interpretation could be changed. With these accompanying graphics, he gives himself and the viewer an account of the mathematical-rational part of the picture’s genesis. At the same time, he reveals the figurative starting point of non-representational art. Colourful beetles, for example, become the inspiration for colour combinations, while the curve of their wings becomes the starting point of a light-dark gradient within the same colour through the modelling shadow of the body. …
Despite ostensibly complete abstraction, Thomas Deyle’s works are often created against a background of thematic ideas. The interaction between representational source material and the associations with objects that arise during the painting process is also manifested in the titles of the paintings. One looks in vain for the standard title of abstract art ‘untitled’.
Markus Golser, translated by Juliane Rogge