Given this diversity that Thom Trauner shows, it seems inadequate to deal with his biographical details along stereotypical lines. However, many a non-negotiable fact – such as born in 1964 in Wels, resident since 1999 in Scharnstein – cannot be avoided without reference of this kind.

Coming from a working class family, Thom Trauner chose an apprenticeship as a lithographer. The artistic creativity of his mother, whose works were almost all irreparably lost during the Second World War, inspired him from his youth. From an early stage, Thom Trauner was already trying to implement this artistic talent in his own way. Alongside his job, where he learnt the basic principles of classic photography and traditional printing, he used a diverse range of photographic printing processes, such as cyanotype, adapting these in his own unique fashion.

Although the main focus of his creative work is on the visual level, Thom Trauner has been firmly associated since the early 80s with the punk-rock band ‘Frontal’.

He nevertheless busied himself unwaveringly through self-study with the practice and theory of numerous painting and drawing techniques, going on to develop these over the years into an autonomous style. In 1995, however, his entire work experienced a major break as he destroyed numerous of his creations in order to demonstrate, externally as well as internally, a completely new beginning. From this time forward, he began to produce numerous, mainly large format oil paintings that foreshadowed his current style: in-depth themes, manipulation made clearly visible through programmatic blurring, where the concrete becomes effortlessly abstract without, however, losing the content in the process.

Thomas Rappel

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I would categorise Thom Trauner’s really clever style of painting as photo-realism. A photo, film or still used as a template or often also just as a prompt for the picture to be painted. That means too that the item to be painted, a scene, is not always brought out on the canvas in pin-sharp focus.

Indeed the opposite is possible, with the objects, people and scenes portrayed with a certain lack of sharpness as if the events were being viewed through a filter of frosted glass. There are blurs, reminiscent of the fleeting character of newspaper photographs. A quickly recorded graphic print enlarged to an enormous size as with a grid enlargement that increasingly loses sharpness the bigger it becomes and thus looks shadowy and unclear.

Paradoxically, the closer we are to the work, the less clear we perceive it to be. This lack of clarity influences our perception and powers of recognition. The lack of clarity becomes here a stylistic method, a system and helps the artist to convey the content of his picture.

Following the wars in the Middle East and the Balkans, and our participation in them via television from the comfort of our armchair, we have to have doubts about the credibility of how pictures are relayed and what truth they contain. For governments manipulating pictures is an integral part of information and disinformation. We don’t know what’s true or what is reality, for how often do we experience something happening only later to hear the exact opposite recounted by a press statement. An extreme case? I think not. We know neither what went before, nor what came after. Each makes of it their own story.

Thom Trauner is an artist of the present who tackles in a serious and very professional way these and other contemporary themes. Themes that affect us all and cannot leave us cold and uninvolved. His narrative painting style undoubtedly helps us with this.

Walter Luckeneder