Dear People!

Pictures have it in itself!
No, nobody should be induced or forced to stumble over the far-fetched, one can feel convenient on what is so near.
Nobody have to chew on tough interpretations (well done like a 20-minute steak), choke it down politely or spit it secretly into the plant bucket. Dare to look.
Nothing for-chewed, everything melts on the tongue.
Who does not shy at "Meetings" here, mixes oneself among "Boys In Love" and "Subtly Feeling Out" with "Devotion", whom will extend with the "Visit To The Zoo" the personal horizon.
Short of the edge of a plate; because: the plate is not still emptied, and "property scold" has priority. The art in and at the general one.
Sigmund Freud was it who transferred the culture into sublimated sexuality, and it is almost trivial, to expose the artist, so he articulates oneself, as an exhibitionist.
He tears up the coat and shows us ... what? We put back descriptions and ask: Is someone frightened, shocked, indignant? Not at all, what we are seeing looks us similarly.
That, more or less, comes later on the desk.
Let us stay another instant more in general, in the basic one, although the argument with contemporary art terms is just as successful as the salvage of the soap from the full bath.
Regarded from the outside it may be amusing, if one look over the fact, that the soap already resolved itself after ten unsuccessful attempts.
But we still continue to look for, and grasp, in order to remain pictorial, into the shelf.
Quotations of the finest one, but with Peter Sloterdijks everything else is enclosed: namely that the interpretation of the artworks, inverts itself into the artworks of the interpretation.
"until the function of the artworks seems to consist of standing to its own victorious interpretation not too much in the way by the critic."
Indeed: the truth comes to its right and form, it is just for slobbering down, delicious. Obligation and free exercise linked of conviction. One may do there say more than "so there!"?.
Or perhaps, can we still put one or another one dot on the top of an "i"?
The title of the Sloterdijk reading "Copernican Mobilization and Ptolemaeic Disarmament" nevertheless loads in to a modest metaphor.
Isn’t it a kind of retrotcopernican turn, if paintings becomes no more circled round from interpretations, but paintings circle in eccentric epicycel art-market-mufti, because only in this way such a thing like attraction is to be documented?
It has really a deeply tragic course; because progress in the art was called extension of boundaries until there were not no more.
And now? We leave the general places now with a satisfying feeling of resignation and the pleasant aftertaste of the know-it-all and arrange our impartial view to the fore-groundingly decorative and to the imperativly cryptic exhibits.
Let’s permit us the liberty to secret into and to interpret out to.
The artist cannot offer resistance to praising words and applause from the wrong side.
Bernd Obergassel makes it, unfortunately I would like to add almost, easily for us to become familiar with his paintings because he gives them titles.
Unfortunately, because he takes us the liberty to make spontaneously even their acquaintance. That is just as delightful as productive; because in principle these are "old acquaintance".
Interhuman relations, communication problems.
The "Flirting Spiral Necks" likewise, like the "Curiously Looking Screwnecks".
From the latters, one must nevertheless probably assume that they were originally completely slim and straight-line.
Until they met each other.
Directly course-bends each other, but fearfully, - from shy assessment or due to traumatic experiences.
Regarding the other one longingly and look away nevertheless again as surprised with a sin.
No miracle that the "Necks" looks like that in the course of time.
One must be anxious about the specimen on the right hand side - the green colouring shows obviously difficulty in breathing.
Also from other paintings, "Snipping Fingers", "Subtle Feeling Out", "Mating Season" and particularly "The Two Inclined Egg Heads" intensively this conflict between longing and fear being expressed, and in a first reflex one divines as a viewer that one gets involved, with the attendance of an exhibition - also this exhibition, - in an experiment, i.e. an experience with oneself.
The paintings are, daubography back and forth, a kind of a tubing-chess test.
The artist, and that is perhaps an interesting definition, forces the viewer on the couch, when he engages on he must diagnoses himself.
The interpretation can be an exorcism - can somewhat magic take out, makeing it visible.
The way of the artist may be another. He can add his abundance in form and colour, or pure need makes him inventive.
In both cases Bernd Obergassel formed this out to "life fiction stories".
Forming one human out of loam is one thing, bring into life is the other one.
On the other hand it is not enough to (survive) live, on the contrary to it, it is nessessary to experience.
The same vita can be felt as a long serious illness, or as an elysium.
The so-called objective reality is dogma and manipulation.
On the other hand the artist sets its intuition a relativity theory, which is certainly older, as those of the colleague Einstein.
One does not need to understand it, one must have a feeling for it.
That requires courage and tolerance.
One must bear oneself in his many facets, because one is full of devotion and doubt at the same time, melancholic and frolicsome.
In us are foreigner, asylum-seekers and late repatriates, other realnesses. We must be unfaithful! Dare side-leaps. Imagine.
How could our longing look alike?
Or our confidence, our restraint, our intuitive feeling, etc.?
Look at the paintings of Bernd Obergassel, and you will have the opportunity to inspect all that abstractly and concretly - simultaneously.
And if it requires still another support, then arrange a suitable music repertoire and hum it quietly, while you walk carefully from painting to painting.

(Dr. Peter Jakob, Dortmund, 1997)