
The parallel worlds of Rayk Goetze With “Barbaric Splendour” Rayk Goetze creates a strange universe: the characters stand out against abstract backgrounds ready to bury them. It is less a question of a materialisation of being and a dematerialisation of the world than the mise en abîme of the former in the latter. Painting finds here a metaphysical force. Coming from the New School of Leipzig, he continues his search for a new pictorial language, taking inspiration from the Masters of the Renaissance, Mannerism and Baroque. There is a quest for identity where people seem to be captured by a freeze frame that fixes them in their movements. Solitude seems unbreakable in such enigmatic presences: impressionism, expressionism and abstraction blend superbly in a world as dark as it is luminous. The work is intelligent, impertinent, even shocking and sometimes funny but in the second degree. It is no longer a question of putting on the retina of the toupee or fantasy in the mind. The surface is no longer the impeccable nurse of identities. It stretches like a worn skin where the imagination never stops tapping it. Everything begins to float, to fluctuate in various drifts that open thresholds. The image by its effects of fringes and twists crosses them. Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret Publication L’internaute, Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, 08/05/2017.