The way I think and feel has evolved through my urban surroundings. I do not have an intensive relationship to nature, even if I can well appreciate it. For me, it has always had the feel of an abandoned home, a feeling you think you have got over, a home you really miss and to which you can no longer return. For me, landscape is a highly abstract phenomenon that is well suited as the screen onto which to project private and public desires. You expect to find freedom, happiness, power, an intact world, eternity in the distance - desires which are above all engendered by the media. The landscape is thus a great remake, where hopes and ideals come together in concentrated form on the horizon. Somehow I see all my work as part of this landscape.

The concept of nature is now no longer conceivable without the image of it in the media or the phenomenon of mass tourism. This becomes very evident with landscape events such as the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley or the Niagara Falls. In the 19th century, for his breathtaking painting "Niagara Falls" Frederick Church chose exactly the selfsame spot as that which countless tourists, landscape and ad photographers take in order to shoot their pictures. My version of Niagara in the "Landscapes" series is based on this perspective. In other words, there seems to be an optimal angle for the sublime most of us have adopted on several occasions in a virtual vein before actually experiencing the landscape "in reality".

Both in my pictures and in the media the focus is on generating desires. The goal of the media is sales successes. To this end, "beautiful" images are created. I would lie were I to say that they leave me completely cold. Moreover, I have worked for years now as a model and actor in ads and ad commercials, which has given me an internal perspective as it were on this seductive system. I use these "beautiful" images as part of my artistic strategy. I initially wish to seduce the viewers and thus focus at first on the origin of my pictures. I take a detour through partial affirmation, but aim to achieve a calm if clear breach with the original contents. To this end I hunt out material that is adequate to the respective theme and suitable methods for transforming it. I exclude nothing, neither techniques that have a strong tradition in art history nor kitsch nor the deceitful beauty of advertising. I am interested in those transpositions and techniques of the media that serve to create distance. To my mind, distance strengthens the aura.

Yes, although I deny the autonomy of the artwork I believe in an aura, an ability of the image to have an impact beyond all rational perception of it.

I do not lay claim to creating something sublime. However, I have a certain affinity to motifs of the sublime and this is reflected in my choice of themes and the sources I take for images. There is then a link forged between the original image and my image, between the media-based image laden with collective desires and emotions, on the one hand, and my own dreams or fears, on the other. The motifs are hollowed out and yet they are also charged with new meaning. In this way, the subject matter is again given a mystical content - that is incessant interaction.

To my mind, these products from the world of commodities form a significant part of our reality, our everyday aesthetics. I do not want to consider them in terms of a critique of society or, as regards my supraordinated landscape picture, as technological flotsam as it were that has washed ashore from a foreign world. I initially scrutinize these profane objects to assess their atmospheric and metaphorical qualities, then extract them from their normal context and group them together in a new setting.

There may at first sight be no logical connection between the objects which I place next to one another in my installations. Yet I select them and compose the structures by dint of some intrinsic compulsion. I do not wish to strip things of meaning, as did Duchamp, but by contrast to focus on the contents and relativize conventional meanings, as it were. The installations have a certain associative or narrative value. Often, I take personal experiences and impressions as my starting point without, however, wishing to illustrate them. In the case of "Somewhere not here", for example, the point of departure was a severe car crash.

In order to articulate these emotional properties at some universally applicable and metaphorical level I draw on the formal idiom of Minimal Art, which, after all, programmatically rejected all forms that were singular or narrative, all illusion and reality outside the artwork itself. However, unlike the proponents of that movement, I always wish to bring my subjective view of things, my own signature and style, to bear.

Yes, I make use of traditional casting techniques, and quote them to a certain degree. I use the sculptural principle at the semantic level, too, by moving from the outside inwards. By reducing, deforming, and segmenting the profane texts, I manage to instill these future-oriented sentences with a strange universal applicability such as in the case of "Certain things have not materialised and possibly they never will." What then hangs on the wall in the form of a sculpture is a verbal torso, blessed by the mass media and given, qua firm sculptural existence, the status of an icon.

I endeavor to subtly shift the levels of reality. Reality, fiction and the private domain converge in this way. I wish to spawn a diffuse state that oscillates between the real and the surreal, an ambivalence of the sensuously tangible and the immaterial. There are references to cosmic, organic areas, but the seismographic oscillations have been manifestly simulated with technical means, the special effects are there for all to see and recognize. In this manner, I create a special atmosphere, an interstice between nature, technology and artificiality.

I still find Land Art fascinating when looking back on the 1960s. Without a doubt I draw here and there on Richard Long, Robert Smithson or Walther de Maria. But it is likewise obvious that this form of Romantic imagery is no longer possible. I lock into my current reality by trying to compress the current experience of landscape and regenerate it on a readily tangible scale, "en miniature" so to speak. Here, I make use, among other things, of the aesthetics of Luna Park grounds and the auto dealerships.

The auto is an icon of today, reflecting many of our desires, such as the wish for freedom, a lack of constraints, luxury,... it's a status symbol, a way of cloaking our self. And yet it of course also reflects down to the smallest detail the technological progress achieved by the society of the day. A blind faith in progress is obviously no longer in order, but a certain fascination for autos and other technological achievements is something I would not wish to deny.

My installations are constructed, artificial and therefore not even I can decipher them completely. I attempt to ensure a certain irrational dimension which remains intrinsic to them. For this reason they are probably pretty phony.

Even if my works exhibit a certain melancholy, I do not consider the installation scenarios from the end of time but more as the suspension of time, as time lags in which the factual drifts off into the realm of the abstract. Essentially, such a standstill is highly constructive and attractive, as it intensifies the tension as to what is to follow in a dramatic way. And it is charged with potential energy. Like a torso which as a rule is far more dynamic than the sculpted human body as a whole, as the absent limbs offer an infinite variety of possible interpretations.