Temporary Walkable Ground Painting
Siebenbrunnenplatz · Wien · 2026
This temporary ground painting extends my artistic practice beyond the canvas and into public space. While my paintings are typically experienced in galleries and exhibitions, this work becomes part of everyday life, encountered in a square that people cross, inhabit, and experience each day.
Movement, transformation, and perception lie at the core of my practice. Figures, forms, and fields of color overlap, emerge, and disappear. Depending on the viewer's perspective and the time spent observing, new relationships reveal themselves. What first appears abstract may suddenly become figurative before dissolving once again.
The ground painting follows the same approach. It invites viewers to make their own discoveries and to experience a familiar place through a different lens, if only for a moment.
By existing directly on the ground, the work becomes part of the city's daily rhythm. People encounter it unexpectedly, walk through it, or observe it from a distance. In this way, not only the painting itself but also the public space becomes a place of encounter, interaction, and shared experience.
29 May 2026
The project was realized with the support of the District of Margareten and the City of Vienna.
Growing up in an artistic field of tension between concrete-abstract painting and fragile, anthropomorphic sculpture, Jacob Mattes developed an uncontrollable creative impulse at an early age. Guided by this familial sensibility, the figure becomes the protagonist in his oeuvre, which oscillates perpetually within the realm of painting. She appears in it in varying degrees of clarity and subtlety. In an intimate painting process, he first creates the foundation of his flat, painterly compositions, which is characterised by a soft palette and a lasur-like application of colour. As the genesis progresses, the initial intuition gives way to control: virtuosically, he breaks through the dynamically opening, airy image world with a strong line and contrasting contours, guided by deep emotion and the fundamentals of painting. The work develops its narrative, which stimulates without prescribing. To this end, he severs the figure into its constituent parts. He abstracts until ultimately only rudiments remain. In the process, Mattes completely divorces himself from the idea of creating a concrete image of the protagonists that form in his mind, their proportionality and thus the foundations of his initial nude drawings – he deliberately creates a sense of estrangement. Physiognomic details emerge. Hands and feet, for example, that seem to come from another world. A world that is worth exploring.
– Patrick Schuster
