OTTO PLACHT: Calligraphy of Jungle

Otto Placht (born 1962) works in an improvised studio in a former aircraft hangar on the banks of the Yarinacocha lake, where he combines native and modern artistic traditions. His painting is a story within a language of images. At AVU he began as an expressive painter, and belongs to the generation
of the 1980s. During that period he participated in confrontations of exhibitions and was a protagonist of the struggle for wildness in painting. From his Central European roots he draws his relationship towards symbolism, mystical decadence, surrealistic expression and new figural painting. In 1993 he visited Peru for the first time. Here he discovered a new creative energy, and later also a personal vindication of the direction he had chosen. He consciously experiments with the limits of cognition, which he extends in the spirit of the traditional rituals of the Amazon shamans, and absorbs the magical energy of the jungle, as well as the myths and traditions within the time of family life in a native community of Indians of the Shipibo tribe.