Porphyrgebirge 1972

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"I believe that I have arrived at what I do now through a long, creative process of constant selection from what I saw and the adaptation of all the forms I saw to my own. This halfway corresponds to my dream of representing the real. And I do it with paper and pencil, canvas and paint" (Max Weiler).
Max Weiler called the paintings of the years 1969 to 1973 "Landschaften auf tönenden Gründen", or "Personal Landscapes". They form a closed group of works that developed within his oeuvre after the work on the wing paintings. "Afterwards," Weiler wrote in his journals, looking back, "it occurred to me to exploit the emotional value of colour. If I had previously painted my found forms on the white picture surface, I now immersed this picture surface in a colour." He also painted these pictures with egg tempera, a technique that shaped and characterised his artistic practice as a whole. His feeling for colour and his knowledge of the technical possibilities of egg tempera led to exciting colour contrasts. Nature seems to be in motion, supported by the organic, fluid painting medium. In the panel "Porphyry Mountains", however, Max Weiler also takes up stylistic devices that he developed in a series of large-format graphic works in 1968/69. These were line works made of fine curled lines, which he placed in front of coloured backgrounds even then. Although he always emphasised painting an equivalent of the landscape, developing pictures "like a landscape", painted at best along the lines of nature, in the case of this picture he must have been familiar with the rugged mountain range of the same name in Argentina through illustrations. Above all, the characteristic, towering summit formation can be found in the picture. This cannot be denied, for the Tyrolean mountains, such as the striking Tschirgant near Imst in Tyrol, were also models for the painter. But even if real things can be associated, Weiler's landscapes are always abstract "artificial landscapes, artificial forms that are meant to suggest nature", according to Weiler, and located on a philosophical meta-level. He himself wrote in 1972, the year the painting was created: "My work is a spiritual one. This connects me with currents that occur in mountainous countries from China to Tyrol. [...] The great shadows of the mountains, the narrow sky, the opaque forests, the opaque region. I can reconcile the content, content and form of my paintings." The painting was already exhibited the following year in 1973 as part of the artist's solo exhibition "Max Weiler, Landschaft auf tönenden Gründen - Gemälde, Graphik 1969-1973" at the Krinzinger Gallery in Innsbruck and reproduced in the catalogue."
(Silvie Aigner)