Jens Fölting: Beauty waits in plain sight - pause to retrieve it
Is it final? (2025), Mixed media on linen, 140 x 100
What does it mean to truly take a look and perceive? In an age defined by acceleration, distraction and an endless succession of images, Munich-based artist Jens Fölting proposes something deceptively simple: pause. Look twice. Allow a moment to unfold before it disappears.
This idea of Innehalten - of pausing - is at the heart of Fölting’s artistic practice. His paintings inhabit the space between what is seen and what is felt, between the recognisable world and the memory it leaves behind. Working predominantly on large-format canvases and using mixed media, he does not seek to reproduce reality literally. Instead, he pursues its emotional resonance: the sensation of light, colour and atmosphere at the precise moment when perception becomes experience.
There is a productive tension at the centre of Fölting’s work. His paintings can evoke landscapes, natural forms or fleeting atmospheric conditions, yet they resist settling into conventional representation. Impressionism provides a point of departure, abstraction a means of departure from it. What remains is not necessarily an image of a particular place, but an atmosphere—something remembered rather than documented.
Fölting himself identifies three major artistic reference points: J. M. W. Turner, for his transformative treatment of light and atmosphere; Mark Rothko, for the emotional and spatial potential of colour; and Jackson Pollock, for the immediacy of gesture and the freedom of spontaneous mark-making. The dialogue between these influences is visible in Fölting’s practice without becoming a matter of imitation. His paintings instead occupy their own territory, where atmospheric sensitivity meets physical gesture and colour becomes both subject and structure.
This makes the surface of a Fölting painting particularly important. The canvas is not simply a support for an image; it is where perception is negotiated. Layers of colour, traces and gestural interventions create an unstable visual field in which forms seem to emerge and recede. The viewer is encouraged to move between recognition and uncertainty - to identify something familiar, only to see it dissolve again into paint.
That ambiguity is essential to Fölting’s understanding of beauty. Beauty, in his work, is not presented as a fixed or decorative quality. It is transient. It exists in changing light, in the atmosphere of a landscape, in a particular colour relationship, in the brief instant before an impression becomes memory. His paintings attempt to hold on to precisely this instability.
The resulting works ask for a different kind of attention from the viewer. They do not necessarily demand interpretation in the conventional sense. Instead, they create conditions for viewing and perception. A painting becomes a space in which one can slow down sufficiently to notice what would otherwise remain invisible.
Fölting's work ultimately occupies a compelling position between the atmospheric legacy of Impressionism and the expanded possibilities of contemporary abstraction. Yet the distinction between these categories becomes less important the longer one investigates. What matters is the experience produced by the painting: the way colour can suggest distance, how a gesture can imply movement, how an apparently simple field can begin to reveal emotional depth.
For Fölting, painting is therefore an act of preservation - but not preservation in the documentary sense. It is an attempt to preserve a feeling.
In a culture saturated with images, this distinction feels increasingly significant. Fölting is not interested in adding another image to the visual noise. His paintings ask for something different: time. They invite the viewer to suspend the rush of everyday perception and rediscover the beauty contained within a moment that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
The proposition is quiet, but persistent: beauty waits in plain sight. We simply need to pause to retrieve it.
Evening Hike (2026), Acrylic on linen, 100 x 100 cm
The Firefly Effect (2025), Acrylic on linen, 100 x 100 cm
A Trace of Green (2026), Acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
Let go - Somewhere on Sardegna (2026), Acrylic on linen, 80 x 120 cm
photography by Lisa Koch
