Portraits of a Mental Society

The paintings of Till Schermer, who lives in the small town of Zwenkau, Germany, with just 10,000 inhabitants, may at first glance seem crass and even shock the individual viewer, just as one can sometimes be shocked by individual thoughts, moods and characteristics of one's own personality. In any case, from Schermer's point of view, a person's personality as a coherent entity is nothing more than an illusion, a fictional construct created to give us a viable self-image. For him, it is not a person's personality that controls their thoughts, feelings and ideas, but the other way round: these psychological processes each have their own personality, a will of their own, and they push to be seen, understood and put into action. The totality of all these coexisting elements vying for attention is what the artist calls the mental society, and the consensus on which they agree is what we perceive as human personality.

In his paintings, Schermer gives expression to the protagonists of the mental society, tracing ambivalent and complex phenomena such as the change of mind, the origin of language, the motoric nucleus or a concretisation without understanding. He makes the fragments of the human psyche – or, as he would probably say, its formative building blocks - visible and tangible, tracing their origins and ramifications in a multitude of directions. By its very nature, each visualisation can only be one of many possible approaches. It is an impulse for reflection and introspection that can lead to new perspectives on oneself and one's fellow human beings.

More about the artist: Till Schermer's artist page