How are you? How are you doing? How are you? – A greeting often used as a stock phrase, to which people respond with a stock phrase. Because the question (usually) does not elicit a profound or challenging answer.
What do we really want to know about the people we meet? What do we perceive? How much attention do we give them?
How are you? Ferdinand Melichar and Pia Weissinger don’t let us off the hook so easily. They stop us in our tracks. They make us look closely, take in and reflect. By not showing us people in a polished self-presentation. We see people unadorned. Overcome by powerful emotions that they (and we) often find difficult to name and understand precisely. The people we see in the pictures are gripped by turmoil and irritation. They seem to be asking themselves: What is happening to me? What should I do, what can I do? What can I expect? What can I hope for?
Melichar and Weissinger bring life to the canvas in an expressive way. Both have a subtle sense of emotional states and the ability to portray them and confront them. They perceive, absorb, and bring emotional conflicts to the canvas with color and figuration. Complex. With classical painting. Impasto. With clear traces of paint application. Layer upon layer. With verve and also delicate nuance. Plastic. Never flat. Multi-layered and complex in aesthetics and—correspondingly—profound in theme. They paint without prior sketches, without photographic templates. Their creativity bursts forth, unfolding in action, unconsciously, without being able to put it into words, without even being able to adequately express it in words. Concepts are abstract. The images appear sensual and immediate: a transfer of perception and sensation onto the canvas. A reflection of emotional states and interpersonal relationships.
These are emotionally charged scenarios. Invitations to immerse oneself in shimmering worlds of emotion, to experience them. Openly. Because life is what it is. Not as it should be according to desires, fantasies, and expectations. Thus, the images are sensual, erotic, brutal, disturbing, provocative, comical, absurd, cynical. They are an examination of the complex, intertwined, ambivalent human emotional life.
The positions of Melichar and Weissinger demand attention and interpretation. They challenge us to explore the situations in which the people depicted find themselves, what is going on inside them, what feelings move them, often overwhelming them, causing them to suspend their reason. How they relate to others or how they avoid relationships, withdraw. Or—as in Ferdinand Melichar’s self-portraits—how they explore themselves.
The works of Melichar and Weissinger resonate with viewers, confronting them with existential irritations—questions of (self-)understanding and orientation, the search for meaning, purpose, the struggle for identity, freedom of will and action. They offer us artistic-psychological insights.
An insight from sociologist and philosopher Eva Illouz is illuminating in this regard: “A wasted life is one in which we fail to grasp our own crucial feelings. Feelings are not only at the center of our existence, they are that center itself, because it is only through feelings that we can recognize what is truly important to us. Not recognizing our own feelings means not knowing what is important to us. If we do not know what is important to us, it means that we allow others to take possession of our inner selves. It means that we never discover what constitutes our own relationship to the world.“ (Eva Illouz, ”Explosive Modernity,” p. 359)
Illouz offers us a bold idea: that the function of art essentially consists in constructing its own reality and leading us through sensual experience into deeper dimensions of our existence, thus enabling us to access more profound truths.
Ferdinand Melichar, born in 1962, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under Markus Prachensky, a representative of Informel, alongside Mikl, Hollegha, and Rainer, all co-founders of the St. Stephan group, and under Walter Eckert. Curator Sabine Fellner notes that Ferdinand Melichar’s artistic origins can be traced back to the “Neue Wilde” (New Wild Ones), the 1980s art movement that turned decisively back to painting as a reaction to conceptual art, which had been declared dead. His paintings are characterized by “a joyful narrative style.” Fellner continues: “Ferdinand Melichar knows exactly how to provoke. Sensuality and intellect collide in his imagery. He shows us the reality he experiences, laid bare, with all its aspects, its beauty as well as its abysses.”
This makes him not only a contemporary painter, but also a highly topical one. He is not one to sugarcoat things. He is not someone who offers decorative art that requires no reflection. Melichar challenges himself and the viewers of his work. He addresses what touches and moves people (often on a subconscious level). When asked whether art should renew or change, he responds with a reference to Anulf Rainer: “Perhaps it should rather deepen.”
Melichar’s friend, the poet Peter Turini, says: “In his art, the most terrible and the most beautiful are very close together, only a few wing beats apart. I think this is the simplest and most difficult truth to bear: our lives are so beautiful and so hideous at the same time because we are so beautiful and so hideous at the same time. The painter Ferdinand Melichar paints neither the new nor the old, neither the ugly nor the beautiful. He paints the truth.”
Pia Weissinger was born in Upper Austria and lives and works in Vienna. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Daniel Richter, graduating with honors in 2025.
Weissinger does not want to dazzle us with illusions. Romanticism is foreign to her, as is any kind of ingratiation. Instead, she confronts reality relentlessly, with all its turbulence, horror, pain, suffering, and dread. With fears and anger, controversies and conflicts, lies and suffering, malice and envy, rejection and rage, deception and tragedy. Her warning: Let’s not kid ourselves: All of this is part of real life. – In this way, her positions correspond multidimensionally with those of Ferdinand Melichar.
Weissinger says of herself that she examines and analyzes “the abysmal goings-on of people and the multi-layered horror of life” with “psychological scanning.” She characterizes herself with a mocking wink as a painter “with the tenderness of a cleaver.” With irony and Viennese humor, with the gift of perceiving the comical even in abstruse, tense, tragic situations and not allowing herself to be completely overwhelmed by misery.
Her formula is simple, she says: “Something happens or has happened.” – With turbulence and often destructive potential. As psychology explains to us: also because people overload themselves with exaggerated demands and expectations, with unfulfillable needs for control, experiencing everything that cannot be controlled as a personal deficit, as defeat. As embarrassment, exclusion, hopelessness, ruin.
Weissinger notes: “By revealing my observations, the sensations and tensions I perceive, and the dynamics that unfold as a result, I gain distance and a certain degree of freedom. Because it allows me—similar to dissociation—to take note of what is happening and at the same time remove myself from the situation. Not least out of self-interest, I want to be able to endure tensions, ambivalences, and contradictions, and to explore and understand psychological processes and feelings. What emerges from the unconscious into consciousness loses its power over me.”
