About

THE TRUE REALITY OF NATURE

"The physical world and nature contain so many wonders that there is little need for the surreal."

This sentence of the British author Ian McEwan stands for the basic pattern in Matthias Kalts pictorial intentions. For Matthias Kalt is fascinated by the often inexplicable beauty of nature, by the inexhaustible variety of forms, colors, structures and patterns, the seasonal and atmospheric changes.

Natural Abstraction – Matthias Kalt Photography

by Eva Buhrfeind, art critic

Besides air and earth, it is especially water, ice and snow that inspire and photographically challenge him. And it is the transformations of these seasonal states of aggregation, the atmospheric and geographic influences and physical processes that constantly captivate Matthias Kalt: This kind of nature, whose manifestations change imperceptibly, when topographies are constantly reformed. When colorations and modulations change again and again, when impressive states and views are formed anew – as an inexhaustibly staging nature.

WHAT DO WE SEE? AND IS WHAT WE SEE WHAT WE SEE?
From photography one usually expects a depiction of reality. At first glance, however, Matthias Kalt's large-format photographic works seem unreal. Initially not tangible, nature seems detached from its reality – abstracted in the original sense of the Latin word abstrahere – the freeing, detaching, omitting of details.

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But Matthias Kalts photographs are quite real, they are not even detached from a reality, their reality only offers us new possibilities of perception. Once upon a time, the photorealists created a refined representationalism that deceived the eye. Matthias Kalt now uses a digital camera to create abstract-looking atmospheres and fascinating in-between worlds with a wide range of interpretations between reality and surreality, perception and imagination – which equally deceive the eye and unite painting and photography. 

For what is really seen and exists, reduced to the essential in form and color, at first appears to us like abstract painting. But up close, this interplay of landscape phenomena, traces of earth, water, snow and ice clearly emerges, we recognize the interlocking of snow fields and snowdrifts, watercourses, suggestive reflections, ice formations, topographical metamorphoses. If we look closely, we can even see exciting details such as birds, driftwood – but never people, only landscape, nature.

WHAT DO WE SEE? Actually, we see what the photographer sees, exactly the same detail, the same top view, the same view – the same non-perspectives. And we see what has touched him, Matthias Kalt, in these water, snow and ice landscapes. Be it in Iceland, the land of geysers, volcanoes, coasts and waterfalls, with its karstic nature, the lava-black or sulfur-brown earth, the glacial, volcanic and maritime occurrences. Or be it at the Glarner Klöntalersee, a place of the unbelievably many moods, appearances and changing atmospheric effects, which join themselves as painted, graphically and sign-like composed, to wondrous impressions.

Vita Matthias Kalt

  • Borne 1964 in Aarau, Switzerland, Europe

  • High School with special focus on artistic and creative education, Maturity Certificate

  • 4 years as helicopter transport- and rescue pilot with Air Zermatt

  • 11 years as airline pilot with Swissair

  • Since 2002 air transport pilot with the Swiss Air Force

  • Various trainings and courses in visual design, typography, photography and fine art printing

  • Exhibitions in Zurich, Solothurn, Fribourg (CHE) and Cologne (GER)