BENJAMIN SOMMEREGGER

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” 

– Austrian Proverb –

When an Austrian friend mentions their nationality, someone who is not from Europe usually reply something like, “I adore Austria! It’s full of strange animals like jumping kangaroos!” However, i’m very sorry, Austria is not like that. It is a small country surrounded by Italy, Hungary, Germany, and other European countries. It is frequently overlooked on maps of Europe, although it is a distinct country with its very own culture and traditions. This country is the last splendid relic of a great empire that ruled a large part of Europe in the past and was so important to start the First World War when his emperor was killed, his capital, Vienne, was the main centre of European society for centuries, a place so impressive, so important to give to all of European history and culture an extremely important intellectual sign that changed it forever. Consider that in the summer of 1913, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito, Freud, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand were all in Vienna. Austria formed all of the people who changed contemporary European history and world politics in the year 1900. And if you believe for a moment that all European art was created in Italy and France, you should reconsider your understanding of art history. Consider for a moment that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian like Franz Schubert, and Austria was the home of Haydn, Beethoven, Strauss, and if we want to talk about painting, the list of artists is practically infinite. We can only mention Matthias Laurenz Gräff, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Angela Hitler, Koloman, Moser, and Hans Makart as a few of the people who have made Austria everlasting and absolutely distinct in the history of European and global civilization, culture, and art. Only now, when you comprehend the force and qualities of true Austria, can you understand why Benjamin Sommeregger’s art is so indescribably beautiful, because he is the son of one of Europe’s most ancient and incredible cultural backgrounds. And his multifaceted work was influenced by this culture and area. An art that looks in all directions rather than just one. The most intriguing aspect of Benjamin’s work is its diversity. His collection includes a wide range of subjects, including simple but stunning green landscapes, impressively expressive character drawings, sci-fi artwork that will transport you to other worlds, fantasy and mediaeval artwork reminiscent of fairy tale, horror artwork that can evoke the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and more. So, It’s questionable whether this artist is merely experimenting or actually travelling with his mind and spirit to areas that we typically can’t visit on our own. But here at HEL MORT®, we like to break the norms and look closely at things that most people don’t notice, therefore we’d like to highlight what we think is Benjamin’s distinctive quality, which maybe springs from his personality. And it’s his talent to make people’s eyes look in peculiar angolations in his portraits that make their expressions so vital, so vivid that we unconsciously think they’re alive, like in a photo, and in all his pieces of art, portraiture or landscapes, there’s always some kind of aura of an individual that’s here with us, human like us but in some ways distant from us, like an alien. It’s as if Benjamin is simultaneously connected and disconnected from the rest of the world, as if this person is living in a dimension where only he can see things from a unique distinctive plane of existence, like an old poet dreaming of being on a cloud looking down on the rest of us from his position in the sky, a person in a strange floating level in the middle of a Divine Heaven and the rest of humanity. A dimension made of poetry but also of materialism, where good and bad cease to exist because there is only room for the true visual expression of things, like a time stopping machine that can give us the ability to shoot a polaroid photo of the world’s most authentic forms, showing them to us without emotions, directions, but only for what they truly are. And see things for what they truly are is an art form far superior to all others. Things that are honest in this manner always show us a true form of beauty, something primal and clean like the view of a baby seeing the world for the first time, because nobody is pressing him to follow some standard or the latest fashion trends behind this objective point of view. And in a society like this in 2022, where everyone does the opposite because social media like Instagram and TikTok make us the copy of a copy of another copy, Benjamin Sommeregger is an anomaly, and we believe that his art will reach peaks never seen before in contemporary art in the next years.

If you’re looking for a weird feeling of romantic, infiniteness, contrast between dark and light energies, where everything comes to a halt to show you the true strength of life in all its forms, you should follow Benjamin Sommeregger, an artist who is expanding with his own art in a route never seen before.