Translated from German. To see the text in language of the original, click here.

Suffering and ecstasy

Oil and tempera paintings by Piotr Valilus in the AOK gallery

That's the way things go: When paintings by Piotr Valius appeared in a Paris exhibition of Soviet paintings in 1967, the attention of news disseminators turned to the outsider. When they were made available to everyone in the Moscow studio two months before he died of cancer on February 13, 1971, and around 50,000 people walked through the rooms of the apartment for four and a half years, this was carefully noted. However, after Valery Valius, the son, had emigrated and brought most of the paintings with him to Vienna and then to Stuttgart, he found that interest in them was limited. For this reason, for example, in January of this year he exhibited the painting "Crucifixion" on Stuttgart's Schloßplatz — not in order to sell it, but to do justice to his father's memory.

However, one cannot even blame the gallery owners and museum people for being reserved. Because Valius' ecstatic post-expressionism seems to float ahistorically in a vacuum, the impulsive use of color in the pictures almost seems as if they have solidified into decoration. Forms of expression that have already been fulfilled are no longer able to transport content adequately. For the experience of freedom and bondage, of human suffering, death and the miracle of life, there are then hardly any ciphers that can encompass our understanding of what reality is in all its complexity and fragility.

Valius, who was initially a civil engineer and then supported his family as an illustrator, began painting his large formats in oil and tempera in 1963. They are called "Nike", "The court is in session" or "Self-immolation" and can be seen in the AOK gallery until the end of March. Bearing in mind the utter isolation in which Valius worked and which one cannot help but consider, bearing in mind this isolation, his work ultimately appears as a poignant testimony of a sensitive, gifted and suffering human being to the beauty of life and dehumanization through overvalued ideas, with which power has always and repeatedly tended to drape itself.

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