The painting of the Austrian artist Reinhold Pratschner has a pronounced expressionistic character. It is obvious that this painter is driven to the creative action through experienced feelings, challenged by the reality and its manifestations. The approach to these manifestations does not result from a philosophical perspective, but from his personal pictorial point of view, from a definition of his expression and his own pictorial poetry. The paintings of Pratschner are an authentic testimony of the visual awareness of the painter regarding the challenges of the world and the time his is living and working in. The paintings are carried out in a gestic way, with gestures that are used to trace and define primal experiences and emotions. For the colour application the painter usually uses the palette-knife, whereby he exponentiates its autonomy and relief-like aspect. The colour, therefore its power, its psychological effect and its material appearance are suggestive enunciators of a subjective pictorial idea. Pratschner draws on pictorial elements whose primacy he respects. They are the basis of his artistic expression.

However, the paintings created in the past years bear a kind of an individual "add-on". Upon the painted surface plenty of applications are incorporated by the artist. Mostly it is non "artistic material" (like iron wire, synthetic material, resin), which increases the tactile quality of the object. Here in fact begins the second, post-pictorial formation process of the paintings. This process expresses the artist's desire to illustrate his own feelings, to reify them, to let them become true and tactile. A "wire-drawing" appears most conclusively when it is spanned across a painted texture. Those reified lines sprout out of a thick colour application and rise above the surface where they meet each other, intertwine and proceed in different directions, in order to immerge again into the structure of the colour layer or into the wideness of the painted canvas. Pratschner is very inventive regarding the dissemination of such a texture, so that in certain moments the observer faces the dilemma if lines are drawn, reified or just a shadow on the coloured surface... In any case, the wire applications appear as visible elements which reinforce the coherence of the entire three-dimensional character of Pratschner's paintings.

Simultaneously, the making of such picture-installations indicates that the artistic reaction of Pratschner is both intuitive and rational. Intuitive, because it allows the development of an artistic spontaneity to its ultimate limits. Rational due to the fact that the act of painting is per se the result of a mental strategy which in the post festum period gets "crowned" with specific, non pictorial activities. This grants Pratschner's expressionism a peculiar character. Because it is not about an instinctive or subjective outpouring of emotions but about the structuring of the plastic nature of a picture, about the characterisation of his own pictorial sensibility, about fathoming the power of the personal expression and the determination of the relations towards the world and the time in which the painter Reinhold Pratschner lives and works.