Guido Katol

Guido Katol received his education in the atmosphere of an intensified turn towards painting and developed above all a gestural composition in the area of the figurative. The Villach-born artist studied with Maria Lassnig at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, but his artistic activity began as early as the early 1980s, stimulated by long visits to the studio of Cornelius Kolig, who lived in Vorderberg in the Gailtal valley.

During his studies, Katol placed people, but also the depiction of animals, at the centre of his work. Detached from any illustration, his figurative scenes are an interpretation of dramatic emotional worlds in a contemporary context. The power games between the individual figures, the woman's being abandoned or her triumph over a second, at first wild, seemingly powerful animal, the artist paints with great certainty for the pictorial space on the canvas. The facial expressions and gestures of the figures are at times full of irony and sarcasm and express the tension between the figures directly and unmistakably. However, the intensity of a look, the feel and colourfulness of an animal's fur or a lion's mane also interest Katol because of their material quality and painterly challenge. Thus his works are always also in the dialectic between an interpretation of reality and the sensuality of the colour material, in that they are simply painting - and this in a direct and immediate present. Katol's paintings are moments, snapshots captured in the picture, not posed portraits. Rather, the focus is on observation and the experience of movement. The motif, although the basis of the picture, is not a decoding component. On the contrary, it opens up variations on one's own emotions and memories, but still retains a mystery, leaves open, according to Guido Katol, what lies behind the painting.

One of the most captivating things in Guido Katol's art is that classical characteristics and roles cannot be clearly defined and assigned, and that differences between predator and prey, seducer and seduced, protector and seeker of protection dissolve. That it is impossible to determine what kind of relationship the protagonists in a picture ultimately have, whether interaction is in the foreground or whether man and animal notice each other at all and one is not rather a (heightened) expression of the other.