David Monllor – The Darkness of the Lived Moment
Dr. Antje Lechleiter
David Monllor was born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1987 and now lives and works in Schönenwerd in the Swiss canton of Solothurn. A self-taught artist, he discovered his fascination for figurative painting already in his early childhood. He was twelve when he first came into contact with the subculture of graffiti art, after which urban art became a distinctive trait of his work. But his technical focus began to shift after taking part in a number of solo and group exhibitions in both Switzerland and abroad. Monllor then put his spray can away and oil painting became his medium of choice.
The artist’s current work documents and reflects his immediate surroundings in Switzerland’s Mittelland. Monllor toys with the vivid and vibrant colours of his palette, rendering objects in ways they cannot be perceived naturally in reality. While his work may be categorised as contemporary realism, it is the realism of the latent. Indeed, the artist uses the resources of painting to penetrate the visible in order to bring the invisible to life.
There is no denying Monllor’s keen interest in light. From the French Impressionists he adopted an understanding of colour as light, immersing himself in their favourite themes such as weatherscapes and times of day. But in sharp contrast with the Impressionists, the nighttime in Monllor’s oeuvre is far more than just a time of day; it symbolises, in a metaphorical sense, that which is hidden, the unconscious. The scenes he depicts often resemble film stills, snapshot moments frozen in time. The viewer is drawn into a dramatic and enigmatic scenario, and it is in this sense that the pictures appear devoid of human presence. But ultimately, David Monllor’s theme is always us human beings, reflected back onto ourselves as we consider his paintings and, in the ‘darkness of the lived moment’ (Ernst Bloch), sense that ‘what is known is far from being what is realised’. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel).