1001 Golden Souls
is a series of portraits that portray artists, art lovers, art collectors, museum people and curators.
The pictures drawn in grey-tones are mixed with the color gold to a kind of “Gold-Gresaille”. On the spot, gold
is a superelevation of color and questioning ‘valuable’ rather than it evokes it in a pituresque manner.
The gold floating in the transparent image space has further references in this context. The desire for transparency
is an ancient dream of humanity. The art theorist, Manfred Schneider, illustrates this in his essay “Transparent
bodies, glass walls. Utopias of Transparency “, on various examples of historical pictorial material. He
cites the wish of the philosopher Socrates that all people should wear a window in the chest, so that one can read
in their hearts, in order to be able to distinguish true and false from their speech.
The English science theorist and philosopher Francis Bacon reminds to the crystalline clarity of God’s eye and
postulates that nothing existing should be excluded from contemplation and transparent instruction.
Thomas Aquinas later describes that the souls of the saved are transparent and rest in their glass-like medium like gold.
This idea could be traced back to Plato’s assumption that the beautiful and good in itself is golden.
These and other examples of transparent phenomena from the ancient history to the present show a messianic 
desire in Western Culture to discover here a world free from lying and fake.
The image, composed of transparency and gold, thus corresponds to the Platonic idea, a fiction of the true
and the good in the beautiful. Next to the approach to portray a persons, the golden
heads reflect the wishful image of the artist and the closeness to art as happiness, as a state of fulfillment.