Heinz Roder (1895-1965), Mid-mountain Landscape / - The Secret Of An Insignificant Place -

Heinz Roder (1895-1965), Low Mountain Landscape with Rocks, oil on painting cardboard, 30 x 40 cm (visual size), 40 x 50 cm (frame), signed and dated "[19]34" at lower right. In a decorative stucco frame of the period.

- Small chip at lower left margin, craquelure in the upper area.



- The Secret of an Insignificant Place -


Heinz Roder depicts a low mountain range landscape, but there is no mountain panorama or distant view. He takes us to a place just below the tree line, on the crest of a hill. The fir trees descending into the background make it clear that it is downhill again. Instead of a view of the surrounding landscape, there is a huge rock in the foreground which, together with the firs, restricts the view. Roder transforms what is normally a wide mountainous landscape into a close-up view, following the eighteenth-century practice of blocking the view in order to enhance the intimacy of the depicted idyll.  
Here, however, we are not looking at a locus amoenus, the beautiful place of a restored paradise, but at a rugged landscape with mighty rocks, as it appears in the play of colours. The blue-grey rocks and the ochre-yellow grasses are contrasted by the blue-yellow sky. With the blue-gray rocks and the ocher-yellow grasses the blue-yellow complementary contrast is leading, in which also the sky inserts itself. There is also the dark green of the fir trees, which combines with the mossy growth of the rocks.
With a very reduced palette, Roder has succeeded in creating a colour harmony rich in tension, which also incorporates the contrast in the texture of the landscape: the delicate soft grasses flow around the hard rock formation. Roder evokes these material qualities with a free, almost sketchy, impressionistic line. The grasses are vertically oriented, quick successions of strokes, while the rocks are horizontal layers of strokes. This creates a fluctuating moment that gives the landscape its specific liveliness and brings the aura of the place into the picture.