"I create my projects through a process of artistic research that leaves behind a multitude of by-products. I know my starting point – what the idea is, the initial reflection or whatever it is that begins my process – but I have no idea where I'm going to end up. Of course, when I arrive, I know the result is exactly what I was looking for. I work through a semi-conscious process in which the free association of ideas plays an indispensable role. It is like sailing at night through a winding river: suddenly ideas or images illuminated by a lighthouse emerge, and I have to get them on board. The elements fit together perfectly, even though I do not always know fully by what logic.

I use any and every medium – be it drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video or installation – whatever means that suit the expressive needs of the project I am working on, although I feel myself above all a draftsman and painter. I see myself as a postmodern conceptual artist with a longing for the rigorous dimensionality of the old masters and the gestural outlines of an Antoni Tàpies.

Recently I have been particularly interested in the work of obscurity. I mean by this the will to hide, to bring to light only a part of reality; to distort, overlap, join, cut, and cover as a means to create new relations between ideas, different emotional-intellectual impacts, and divergent readings. I have always thought of painting as pure deception and art in general as a lie. Only the last brushstroke is seen, the final product, and not what is beneath, what has happened before … and before before. Art is a pure lie, an act that has no need or pretense of being proven by facts. And is it not the case that through lying one comes to the truth?"

Werner Thöni
Barcelona, 2019