Josef Taucher. Fine Art Painting. Mountain. Rockface.
Art | Science
At the center of artistic interest is the rock massif, the mountain; a code, the structure of his painting: Josef Taucher first learned the mountain as an extreme climber, later he transformed the physical extreme experience into a meticulous scientific exploration of the rocks and
geological connections.
This knowledge represents a striking break with traditional mountain painting. Realism pretending topographies are a medium for the artistic concern behind it, the representation of the space.
Vertical, bottomless, impenetrable or delicately resolved, abstract structures create images which appear to be very close to reality.
They do not need any submission but are the product of the painting process and experience in and with countless rock walls. It is pure fiction.
Since the 1970s, Josef Taucher has been working with the mountain in his work and has thus supported time spirit on many levels. Even when in Europe the Young Wild Painters had set off, his mountains, abysses, skies and clouds were present. The space is curved, perspectives are tilted and man is instructed to find a safe stand.
From the 1980s onwards, Josef Taucher worked as a scientist and mineralogist recognized in the field.
Fascinated by the aesthetics of crystalline matter, he discovered and described four world-wide mineral species and wrote a variety of mineralogical literature. Further "Newcomers" await their Treatment.
Josef Taucher became a representative of the New Austrian painting and sculpture was internationally known in the early 1980s. In contradiction to the painters' colleagues of the "Neue Wilde" (such as Hubert Schmalix or Josef Kern, among others), his interest is never to depict real human beings, objects or landscapes, but timeless, objective spaces outside of everyday human emotions and moods. The painting technique developed by Josef Taucher in his mountain paintings over the past decades and the legally independent world of colors enable him to paint never-before-seen paintings. With his art seems to be the most likely to stand in the tradition of romanticism, neither ruin nor man, nor a souls' landscape can be seen, is imagined in J. Taucher, decides not a landscape-occupying mountain region for the first time in European art as an independent figure (from the end of the 1970s). Massive, as it were naturalistic mountain eruptions in the dizzying prospect exchange lose themselves with a small picture distance in transparent image depths.
'If you take a look into the abysses of Taucher, you can sense what fear and longing is.
It is a standing at the edge of the abyss of incomprehensibility.
Rock and ice fall, clouds are thrown, or sail peacefully.
You can hear it cracking and screaming and, the complete silence.
Invisible creatures populate the meadows, forests, debris fields, snowfields, rock walls and skies,
and no one knows what is in the depths.
You see almost nothing, but feels everything.' JT
* 4. August 1948, Weiz † 23. März 2022 Bruck a. d. Mur, Steiermark
