In the 1980s, after Wolfgang Walkensteiner had worked as a conceptual artist in his youth, he approached painting (once more) with a fierce, even brutal rendering. Inspired by Picasso and Bacon, the human being was mixed with the animal in a kind of archaic and fundamental chaos. This already presaged his return to the source, this retrospection, the transition from the living to the mineral, from micro- to macrocosmos by means of increasingly abstract painting, that is to say, more and more synthetic, refined and restrained. The human hybrid body bursts and makes room initially for viscid, wavy, entwined forms reminiscent of underwater waves, swarming cells seen through a microscope or a cross-section of the intestines. While he staged a hovering and swaying world, Walkensteiner also painted twisted, clear and volumetric forms – sometimes chopped off at the ends – which, due to its plasticity, contrast with a monochrome background. This form was inspired by a common stove pipe lying around in his workshop. Despite its expressiveness, the object was dematerialised and virtualised. Detached from its surrounding and its function, it was no longer identifiable based on its characteristics, and was given an imaginary dimension as well as a mysterious direction. This transition phase allowed the artist to go from the living world to inertia, from biomorphism to cosmology. This transition started with a series of studies, variations which took place in both painting and sculpture. Starting-point and model were two readily identifiable objects: the egg and the human skull. A giant egg and the merely sketched skull of an ape, the two universal symbols of beginning and end, of life at its source and its relic. A simple form, then, which he breaks, hollows out, dismantles and reassembles, while multiplying viewpoints, changing texture and playing now with impermeability, now sometimes with transparency. Soon Walkensteiner was to move away from nature and his models, the egg and the skull, to create a whole series of small objects representing an exceptional personal collection in which he rummages as in a tool box. The objects serve as an opening, a trampoline for his creative inspiration. This move will illustrate the search for focus, or even a symbiosis between the work as a painter and that of a sculptor. The reduced hand-moulded model takes on a monumental dimension on the canvas. A round or oblong, but in any case irregular shape with hollows and cracks worked into it, is marked by light, shade and by tonal modulations, lending it incredible plasticity. This rather commonplace, elementary form, resembling a eroded stone on the beach or a piece of limestone broken away from a cliff, takes on a statuesque, even cosmological dimension (reminiscent his meteorites pictures). Not content with simply replicating or enlarging the object, Walkensteiner hammers, drills and sands it, polishes it with light, colour gradations and varnishes. With tempera colours which he dilutes following a personal recipe, he plays with transparency or opacity: effects he would not achieve with oils or acrylics. The artist does not make do with rendering an object in perspective, with projecting an illusion of it onto a level surface, but he works like a sculptor who summarises the different perspectives in such a way that the object takes on a mysterious and supernatural dimension. While digital 3D- images are an illusion, here, one could speak of a „disillusion“, as the illusion is falsified. Within ten years, Walkensteiner has abandoned flatness in favour of volume, replacing the mobility of the animated with the stability of matter, violence and the fragmentation of colour with the dominance of light and tonal reduction. Nevertheless, the artist‘s essential qualities remain throughout his development: the ability to free himself from reference or from the model through the metamorphosis of imagination, the clarity of representation, the equilibrium of composition, the concentration of creative energy expressed through the rapidity of execution, the art of working in series without ever lapsing into repetition; in other words, the rare ability to reinvent himself, to replenish his energy as soon as something threatens to become a style.