Since 2023, Christian Manss has been working intensively on the question of how landscape is created in painting - as a perceptual space, not as an image. His paintings are created without a photographic or real template. The depicted topographies are inventions: Spaces of possibility created through the interplay of surface and colour as well as movement and interruption. 

The artist works with soft, sometimes transparent layers, allowing paint to settle and run. A central intervention within the painting process is the deliberate washing away of colour, not as a destructive, random act, but as a conceptual step: Christian Manss uses water to deliberately remove certain layers, open up new spaces and allow the picture ground to shine through again. In this way, he creates pictorial surfaces that enter into a field of tension between construction and dissolution.

This method is combined with the integration of abstract, often geometric or block-like elements that enter into the imagination of the landscape. They lead a life of their own: they mark, irritate or rhythmise. In this way, a dialectical tension is created between surface and gesture, between construction and erosion, between image and imagery.

The titles of the pictures - such as "The last valley, then only peaks", "Black is the sea", "Deep in the glass the knocking loses its sound" - reinforce the impression that this is not about concrete terrain, but about conceptual anchors. They are offers for interpretation. Christian Manss himself speaks of "memory material" - something that is available to everyone and yet has no fixed anchorage.

By not showing real places in his paintings, but instead creating pictorial spaces that oscillate between real impression and suggestion, the artist points to the possibility of viewing landscape not as a given reality, but as a construction - as a mental image. His painting is neither nostalgic nor purely constructive. It oscillates between gesture and structure, between ephemerality and substrate, between surface and space - and not least between a longing for nature and an awareness of its conception. These works are therefore more than just pictures: They are offers to look at, remember and discard. Places that exist and disappear at the same time. Once entered, they disappear again - like innocence.