During the past five years Florin Kompatscher has, on the one hand, discovered a remarkable balance between surreal metaphor and special depth of field in his oil paintings, and, on the other, an abstract concentration as well as a resolution. In so doing, he actually maintains a difficult equilibrium here, which also holds for his pictures that perpetually carry over the memory of the familiar into a dream-like liminal moment. Of course, anyone so inclined can forage in these paintings for quotations, for traces of Dali, Magritte, Tanguy, perhaps even C.D. Friedrich. However, whosoever wants to see how a particular terrain, believed to be exhausted, can be revitalised for a new and concomitantly surprising abstraction, can partake in this stirring engagement of form and colour. The book itself demonstrates this almost in exemplary fashion and is strictly removed from any form of weary didacticism – as such, a battle of pure painting – to such an extent that it is scarcely possible to imagine anything more beautiful.