“We do not see what we see, but what we are,” Fernando Pessoa writes in his Book

of Unrest. Do we not see reality, but what we remember and what we feel? Do we

see or remember the same night? Or the same blue? By shifting and balancing on

this line of demarcation, Treiber advances a condition that first makes the

visualization of these feelings possible and thus assigns the painting a serious role

as our vis-à-vis. Especially when paintings are viewed in a purely motivic way, and

what can be seen is compared with what is known, this can result in a

misunderstanding. Art creates its own rules, fabricates its own reality and in so

doing can stretch beyond the reality we know, complementing it or contrasting

against it. Treiber derives from this a legitimation to make decisions in his paintings

formally and not narratively. In so doing, he provokes a conscious break, thus

declaring what is supposedly false as the very quality of painting, with the effect

that his works somehow might seem not quite right, but are just right.

Frederike Ebert,