Born 1946 in Vienna, 1966 - 1977 studies at the University of Applied Arts (currently University), with a four-year interruption.

About my work: The abstract art that was omnipresent when I began my studies in 1966/68 seemed inadequate to me in all its forms. I was longing for a formal language that offered the possibility of expressing complex contexts of meaning and the "abstract" was not capable of this.

My aim was not to understand content merely as a symbolic, analogue superstructure, but to deduce content from the formal elements themselves and to generate a syntax for this. My intervention back then was an anticipation of digitalisation, namely from the singularity of the "Monad - Holon" to develop complex systems, a visual language, a web of interconnectedness, which was later expanded with line structures, number symbolism, geometries, symmetry patterns, oscillation figures and colour symbolism, thereby gaining plausibility. Here I explicitly refer to the descriptions of matter in the new physics as a relational structure and not as an object-like something; according to Alfred North Whitehead, matter is not made up of substances, object-like, passive matter, but of elementary interlocking and interwoven processes and relations.

In retrospect, after 50 years of art work, 1968 - 1971 was the systemic key to my subsequent artistic periods: starting with my digitising "Monads - Holon Rhythm" (Holon: "that which is part of a whole"), I broke through the endless oscillation between informal and geometric abstraction, as well as the analogue symbolism of the image-like, and paved the way for a new pictorial syntax.
The pictures of the subsequent period "Cosmograms" are also a key phase, here I spontaneously broke through to archetypes, the pictures are based on transpersonal breakthroughs.

This was followed by many years of developing various matrix and symbol systems.
With the style groups "Matrix" and "Symbolism" I transformed the digital monad or holon rhythm into line modules.
This enabled me not only to depict content in a deficient analogue way, but also to generate it anew from deeper layers of consciousness by means of rhythms, numbers, symmetry patterns, oscillating figures and geometries, e.g. my formal symmetry laws referred to the cherubic symbolism of Jewish tradition. This systematic approach enabled me to achieve results of extreme complexity by integrating multiple levels between consciousness and the unconscious or heart and mind.
The Psychograms folder contains works from many stages of my life in a spontaneous painterly style.

Further themes: Bringing the abstractions of "objective" science back into the sensually tangible, vivid realm of the human, the balance between the feminine and the masculine.
"Unified Texture of World Religions and Names of God", 1987 - 1995:
in these paintings I worked with spatial linguistic and pictorial elements, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Sanskrit symbols become carriers of meaning; the theme of humanity and reconciliation is also expressed in a mesh of personal pronouns as a localisation of every possible relationship.

The series "Circles of Light" presents cosmological processes such as primordial matrices.
In the new folder "Transsysteme", until 2024, the picture "Quell des Seins" (Source of Being) reflects basic forms of cultural and religious history. In correspondence with physical reality, the background shows numerical space-time modules as a kind of fabric of space-time, interrupted by quantum fields and loops.
The parabolic symbolism in many of my pictures stands for primordial generation: a single quantum of light as a wave enters one of the parabolic rays, as soon as it has reached the apex it exponentiates itself infinitely and flows out of both parabolic rays as white light.

The image "zero point field" shows criteria of genesis: from the background field, the zero point field or sea of all possibilities, space-time forms develop in numerical progression, inversion and regression, symmetry variables and their breaks as well as overlapping levels as systemic copulas. The picture has a formulaic character.

Processes of asymmetry are depicted in the pictures "Restoration" and "At the end of times". The painting "Donna Divina" evokes "The Creative Feminine" (1997-99 and 2021).
These are examples of a new interweaving of form and content as thematised at the beginning; in the painting, "I have been born" (2022 - 2024), freedom is finally revealed in the systemic orderliness.

Richard Rendl

Mail: richard.rendl@chello.at