"I've never seen René Magritte.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always had the impression that to laugh he had to go down to the cellar. Was he suffering from great loneliness, or from inner coldness? I'm not the most sociable either, but in his being and in his paintings I see something repulsive, or at least alien to me. To be clearer: I perceive the elegant, tragic helplessness of his atheism. Perhaps (and I say "maybe" only because I don't want to pretend to express a clear judgment) he did the best that the "Classical Surrealism" of the time could achieve. His derailments, I think above all (but not only) of his "impressionist phase", show the tragedy of those who never walk a path and necessarily get lost in the process. But artists have the right to be judged for their best work. Anyone who wants to paint and, logically, cannot yet, is fascinated by role models and will try to imitate them. But he should not identify with the respective role model but soon take other paths, because everyone has his own inner life, his own beyond, and only that belongs to him. No surrealist can copy from another. What he paints necessarily becomes something previously unknown, even incomprehensible. Whether this should be called "surrealism" or not is irrelevant. You ask me to what extent René Magritte has influenced me in my work. Well, I looked at her photos and thought about it. Sometimes I have deliberately cited motifs from him or further developed them. I did something like this with Michelangelo and Titian, out of admiration, so to speak. And maybe something slipped inside me out of laziness or unconscious.

But not all apples are stolen somewhere. "

Text by Wolfang Lettl