The recent works of Lukas Müller revolve around the unfinished, the searching. His painting does not present itself as a demonstration of perfection, but as an open process. Elements that seem to have nothing in common encounter each other on the canvas and, in their juxtaposition, unfold their own logic, individual for each viewer. Müller’s paintings embrace both failure and the lightness of play. What emerges are pictorial constellations that make the fragmentary, the experimental, and the uncertain visible, and in doing so, arrive at a new sense of presence. Painting here is less a completed act than a movement: a continuous search that reveals itself in shifting connections and unexpected encounters on the canvas. At times, these connections take on an almost mystical quality, as if the works were guided by a logic beyond the visible, inviting viewers to enter into their unfolding dialogue.
Soft pastel paintings on raw linen and jute that center the overlooked, the passed-by, the almost-forgotten. A candle mid-burn. A dental prosthesis on a windowsill. A single kitchen chair rendered like a solemn portrait. Müller’s paintings are still lifes of psychic residue. Records of absence, disconnection, and fragile belonging. Many of these images come from a homeless shelter where Müller now works. These are not portraits of people, but of proximity: to collapse, to others, to oneself. In the Heim Series, moments appear unguarded and strangely sacred. A pile of spaghetti in a trash bag, a messy bunk bed, a feral pigeon in the streets. These are not documents of despair but quiet affirmations that even discarded things carry memory. Müller’s world is not populated; it echoes. Each work becomes a kind of transmitter, tuned to the strange frequency where silence meets vision. Other paintings drift further outward: suburban foxes, melting skylines, a supermarket cart submerged in a canal. These are images of in-betweenness. It’s here that Müller’s esoteric sensibility emerges. Not as mysticism, but as emotional tuning. His paintings don’t explain; they hum. They ask: what does it mean to be near something, but not quite part of it? Executed in soft pastel, the works are dry, powdery, easily undone, like memory, or breath. Pigment sinks into fabric, seeps, disappears at the edges. Healing, for Müller, isn’t catharsis. It’s a quiet act of seeing, of being with an image long enough that it stops being just an image.
