VIOLETTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA, Siena (ITA)'

THOMAS RIESS
BEHIND THE CURTAIN

opening: 12.09.2025
exhibition: 12.09. - 19.10.2025

VIOLETTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Via di Città 49
53100 Siena SI
ITALY

Violetti Arte Contemporanea 

THOMAS RIESS – BEHIND THE CURTAIN | DIETRO IL SIPARIO

With his gaze fixed on the human being and their relationship with time and reality, Thomas Riess explores the contradictions of a world constructed within a multimedia dimension. His artistic practice – spanning mixed media, painting, and video – visually analyzes and reworks a seemingly perfect but fundamentally artificial reality, which the artist deconstructs and reassembles into unsettling images, rich in ambiguity and critical thought.
At the core of his work is the human face – a subject Riess fragments, transfigures, or dissolves, often starting from a photorealistic language only to subvert its codes. Through these visual ruptures, the artist shifts the viewer’s attention from the figure to the language of painting itself, emphasizing how every image – even the most realistic – is ultimately an illusion, a construction.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that “there is no beautiful surface without a terrible depth.” Riess’s work reflects precisely on this oscillation, within which contemporary humanity drifts like waves, torn between a desire to appear – the only apparent way to inhabit the world – and the need to seek something deeper, something lasting, that defines us and resists ephemerality. After all, the “grand narratives” never truly ended. The real danger is finding ourselves stuck in a vicious circle, an eternal present that no longer looks to the future with purpose, but settles for fleeting gratification, momentary visibility—often illusory – and brief moments of glory.
Riess addresses the sense of estrangement and anxiety that this system fosters in the contemporary individual – not with resignation, but with art’s inherent power to awaken from dogmatic slumber, to reawaken critical awareness and the capacity to imagine a different future.
The relationship between depth and surface, illusion, truth, and deception are themes that have always made humanity reflect. The ancient Greeks knew this well – they loved illusion and surface, precisely because, to them, surface was anything but superficial. The surface of beauty, embodied in the Apollonian aesthetic, had already encountered the tragic dimension of the Dionysian – the depth of the abyss which, as the very German word Abgrund reveals, signifies a lack of foundation. To be superficial, then, was to reflect depth – having known the darkness of the abyss and emerged from it, able to withstand its terror.Thomas Riess thus reminds us that the essence of an authentic life does not lie in the obsessive pursuit of appearance or in fleeting moments, but in reconnecting with the elements of the abyss that define us and that continually manifest on the surface.
The exhibition BEHIND THE CURTAIN presents a selection of works that touch on some of the key themes of his research. The pieces, created for specific contexts, offer a glimpse into the artist’s complex production: from symbolic and surreal portraits to evocative landscapes rooted in personal memory, and even time travelers – enigmatic figures emerging from an uncertain future.