There is no single path to art. Nor are there materials with greater legitimacy than others in artistic practice. Even the fortuity of chance – as the avant-gardes teach – can play a role both in the origin of inspiration and in the choice of means to use.
For Horst Beyer, things went exactly like this. That is, it was chance that acted as a vehicle for the intuition that pushed him to radically change the materials and aesthetic values of his artistic work. After his first youthful experiences with traditional techniques from oil painting to watercolor and subsequent experiments with various mediums, it was the simplest everyday life that offered him unexpected suggestions.
«During the renovation of my house, he says, I happened to come across scraps of electrical wire of different sizes and colors. This material stimulated my curiosity and I began to use plasticized copper wires as if they were a palette of colors; from that moment on, they became the raw and essential material of my works». Words that explain how, right from the start, he was fascinated by the possibility of using electrical wires not to replace paint, but to paint with means other than conventional ones. We are faced with an operation that goes well beyond the simple recovery of waste, because the intent is to ennoble a material that lends itself, due to its intrinsic qualities, to making a "pictorial" use of it, so to speak. It is therefore a question of revealing an implicit potential in electrical wires, of enhancing their chromatic and luministic characteristics as one would do with a painting. It goes without saying that using a tool other than the usual brush implies rethinking the creative process from the ground up. In this case, in fact, there is no starting idea, a mental design to be transposed into the painted image, but it is the material that inspires the artist, that suggests combinations, interweavings, superimpositions, that makes him decide, from time to time, the right relationship between metal and
and color.
Since these are electrical cables, we could say that what happens is a transfer of energy from the material to the artist and vice versa, in a double passage that condenses in the finished work without however running out. This same energy reaches the eye of the observer, passing through the earthy tones of copper, the lunar reflections of metallic grey, the intermittence of warm and cold, bright and opaque hues. A perception accentuated by the way in which the cables are tuned to one another, in a pattern that is now wide and now narrow that runs across the surface in its entirety, vertically or diagonally, with variable cadence and intensity, generating an internal dynamism. This gives rise to vortices, linear designs, and weaves that unfold on different levels including that of the painted canvas placed in the background, directing the gaze towards the centre of the composition or inviting it to move from one point to another on the surface with a movement that is now continuous and harmonious, now irregular and rhapsodic. The alternation of copper and plastic generates a chromatic fabric characterized by the contrast between large areas of red, black, gray, blue and the brightness of the metal in the center or on the sides of the composition, with sporadic counterpoints of green and yellow. In these assemblages, the physical body of the work takes a back seat to the energetic body that manifests itself in the form of frequencies, pulsations, short circuits, deflagrations: the material element thus becomes a means to make visible the forces that move the creative act. Mental, emotional, interior forces, but also more subtle, mysterious, hidden forces, forces that regulate both the life of man and universal balances.
Works that hold together the micro and the macro, the heartbeat and the cosmic breath, man and the stars, to remind us how everything in nature is connected, the infinitely large to the infinitely small. To the network of relationships, exchanges, tensions that characterize a society that is increasingly interconnected today, Beyer contrasts a field of forces that interact to create rhythm, music, harmony. Saving things from their insignificance means not only redeeming them on an aesthetic level but also using them to better understand the reality in which we are inserted. To rediscover, through the symbolic element of the electric wire, the profound meaning of the relationship that connects us to each other, to nature, to living things.
Daniela Pronestì
Art historian
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