Christian Manss deals with the question of how landscape is created in painting. His paintings are created without a real template. By not showing real places, but creating pictorial spaces that oscillate between real impression and suggestion, the artist refers to the possibility of viewing landscape not as a given reality, but as a construction - as a mental image.
The titles of the pictures - such as "The last valley, then only peaks", "Black is the sea","Deep in the glass, the tapping loses itssound " - reinforce the impression that we are not dealing with concrete terrain here, but with conceptual anchors. They are offers for interpretation. Christian Manss himself speaks of "memory material" - something that is available to everyone and yet has no firm anchoring.
By not showing real places in his paintings, but instead creating pictorial spaces that oscillate between real impression and suggestion, the artist points to the possibility of viewing landscape not as a given reality, but as a construction - as a mental image. His painting is neither nostalgic nor purely constructive. It oscillates between gesture and structure, between ephemerality and substrate, between surface and space - and not least between a longing for nature and an awareness of its conception. These works are therefore more than just pictures: They are offers to look at, remember and discard. Places that exist and disappear at the same time. Once entered, they disappear again - like innocence.