Some of the postulates of geometric abstraction or minimalism may be discerned in his work, but one would have to dig a little deeper to penetrate the real spirit or atmosphere which would lead us on to the less well-trodden paths of the avant-garde movements. Because in terms of its influences, Seitz’s painting makes reference more to stimuli linked to time and space than to generic movements or schools. Moments and places which take us from Cézanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire and decorative elements of the backgrounds of the paintings of Matisse, or Cabaret Voltaire, Hugo Ball and Sonia Delaunay, to oriental culture, Byzantine architecture, Turkish architecture or Greek decorative arts.

If painting implies an incessant search for the unknown, Seitz’s pictorial formula provides a symptomatic testimony of the fact. Patterns that are repeated time and time again forming visual labyrinths which conceal their beginnings and ends. Broken spirals which draw the viewer in to a game of chance where the ornamental rises up as the background and form of the painting. In Seitz’s oeuvre ornaments are not conceived of as pure decoration but, rather, as the language to articulate a visual conception which involves a reflection on the gaze and its most intellectual sources. These are images that have been emancipated from that continuous and infinite process in which decorative art takes place. The optical and lysergic, the resistance that his canvasses exert on our gaze, provides an approximate idea of the artist’s unique pictorial approach.

For this exhibition, the ornamental, along with the repetition of patterns, becomes even more evident in the large-scale works in which the concept of the spiral and its multiple variations sketch out a shape which, by repeating itself, encounters its difference. The formal colours and nuances, with geometric gestures such as angles, rhomboids or triangles, mark out the great differences which exist between apparently similar paintings. On the other hand, in the smaller-scale pieces, spontaneity and free and organic interplay are what mark out the guiding lines for the creation of images which, far from being invented by the artist himself, appear to emerge from the back of the canvas as if they were some sort of apparition. It is as such that one could consider Emanuel Seitz to be a pre-Socratic painter who trusts, as in those philosophical postulates, in the prior existence of a locus of ideas, in this case of images, from which one might capture that which allows itself to be seen in these suggestive and magnetic compositions.