Conrad Jon Godly divides his time between Switzerland and Japan. And paints.
Abstraction is never far away in Godly’s paintings. On the contrary, the artist’s relentless efforts to capture the essence of what a landscape is or can be on canvas inevitably prompt him to resort to what is basically an abstract style of painting. Reducing his subject to the essential requires that he restrict his stylistic and compositional freedom. This leads not only to brush usage reduced to just gestures. This process of concentration may imply a subordination of the colours, or their omission altogether. In the latter case, the result is monochrome paintings, limited to either black or white. Using a radically abbreviated painting technique, with which he gropes his way to the outermost edge of the degree of reality, Godly manages to eliminate everything that deviates from the core of the artistic statement.

This method becomes more apparent when the canvases are viewed from extremely close up. If the viewer comes up close enough to a work – depending on the format, the distance to the canvas does not even have to be that small – the mountain world dissolves into its components of striking colour fields and brushstrokes. What when seen from a distance joins together to form a massif with glowing ridges, glistening snow fields and shaded rock falls is, from close up, a crannied formation of layers and faults of paint, of mounds of pastose, and frozen masses of viscous, oil paint. We are reminded of geological processes when viewing such cracked colour material, which forms a distinct topography on the canvas.

Space, light, color, form. Godly mountain composition convincingly express the experience of human nothingness vis-à-vis the size and grandeur of the mountain world. Such dept lies in the layers of paint, in the power and dynamism with which he applies it to the canvas. This painting is not merely peinture, but also has spiritual dimensions.