A Meeting with Franco Thamér

A Lecturer of Culture meets the Artist at Chiemsee Lake

A Tuesday in April 2013: A meeting with Franco Thamér at a promenade at Chiemsee Lake. Chiemsee reminds him of his childhood. Many decades ago, a small boat on Wörthersee Lake in Kärnten inspired him to become a discoverer full of longing for the world. After long-gone years of studying under the renowned art professor Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel (among others), night-long discussions with Friedensreich Hundertwasser in the famous Cafe Hawelka in Vienna and in his own artists’ café La Vie in Cologne, as well as journeys around the world, he has long since joined the international circle of artists. With his inner attitude, Themér has always sought a remarkably profound exchange with the figures of the Creation. Whether as a nature boy, student, artist, designer, father or fashion designer and vice versa – I can still feel, from the very start, his unbridled will, right up to the present, to attain a powerful, uncompromising form of expression, composed with a remarkably vital energy. I instantly feel his intense gift of perception and sense the volcanic intensity of his life and experience as an artist.

From the very start, he directs his glance across the lake and observes the diverse atmospheres of the sky and the Alpine panorama, thus opening the door to the colour tones he experiences so profoundly and in such an existentially significant manner. Throughout Franco Thamér’s life, the colourful language of nature has probably been a key symbol for him: whether when he was fathoming his way through the heights and depths of the human soul in an endeavour to find a positive direction or other pastures. Taking a creative detour as a fashion designer, he had an unbelievably iridescent material, composed of wild silk and cashmere, woven into a unique and exclusive Thamér Blue for his global collection. I discovered one of the sources of his especially incisive and perceptual gift in his childhood. He was allowed to live out this gift, above all, in the feral countryside and, in particular, in a magical dripstone cave, the ‘Eggerloch’. There, he would often withdraw quietly, in complete silence, and in total seclusion, and allow himself to be inspired by new inner colours in complete darkness. As a small boy, he spent two dramatic days and nights trapped in an igloo that had collapsed. In moments of almost fatal unconsciousness, the most wonderful colour spectra and lights were revealed to him in an unbelievable intensity that would have otherwise been almost impossible to experience. Even now, the life he loves so passionately still drives Franco Thamér, the artist, into employing the wild and diversified forms of artistic expression that are so characteristic of him.

In his studio, one can sense an unconditionally lived out desire to experience the ultimate ‘intensity’ in all that is artistically possible – especially from atmospheric light: a variety of background materials allowing for an extraordinarily intensive application of the brush, unique spatula techniques, surface designs and structures. I can already imagine that his inner images might one day compellingly find their figurative expression in the form of sculptures. Well nigh seventy years, experienced pore deep, provide the model for an outstandingly well-schooled oeuvre in terms of its style, sense of colour, and mastery of the brush and colour. Each individual work turns into a vast eruption of colourful impressions from the very depths of the man, Franco Thamér. By Chiemsee Lake, he has created unique artworks which literally tremble in all their fibres and in all the existential domains of lived ‘life’.


Ralf G. Bäuchl
((Specialised author, as well as lecturer in the culture course at the Reinhold Würth Hochschule)



Biography Franco Thamér