2 X Owe Büttner: Phoenix Rises from the Ashes

Those, who accidentally happened to be in the Hõbekass Cafe at Harju Street in the Tuesday afternoon, surely noticed a man with enigmatic look in his eyes and wearing a black beret, sitting in the corner table and drinking red wine. This man was Owe Büttner, a painter. And he drank wine in Hõbekass, because he had just finished hanging his paintings on the walls of the cafe. They will cheer up the visitors of the cafe up to the end of August and even then the walls of the cafe will not remain bare. The Hõbekass Cafe also strives to become a club for artists, filmmakers and cultural workers.
The artist considers the Hõbekass Cafe a very cosy place. Before WW II there was a bank in the building. It also is a few among the buildings at Harju Street that were not damaged by the bombardments during the war. As we later see from the artist's talk, the connection is in a way symbolic.
Besides the Hõbekass Cafe, Owe Büttner's works are currently displayed in an art shop, Graaf, at Väike-Karja Street 8, which is a brand new business in the art market.
The paintings have been produced this year. The artist poses a number of questions to the public. "I have painted three middle-size pictures since my last exposition in the House of the Brotherhood of Blackheads. While the previous show was titled "Uranus", then this series deals with Phoenix. This is a symbolic mystical firebird, who rises from the ashes once in a thousand years.
Then I have thought that one picture depicts Sun and the other one Moon, its like cosmic day and cosmic night. The picture is at first impasto painted and then pointillistically painted over in ultramarine and Chinese vermilion shades: as if two different energetic levels emerge. Everybody decides himself, what personal impact does the painting have." The artist admits that he has increasingly started to be fond of Chinese vermilion, cinnabar green and dark violet. "Those colours symbolize nature: red is life, light green - plants, and purple violet  the mystical colour of space."
The theme of the paintings continues to be the mythological vision of the eternal cycle of matter: "Phoenix is the intermediate between the genesis and mouldering away. The content treats the problematic opposition in our era of highly technicist upheaval. Phoenix is an attempt to visualize the era for myself."
Owe BÜttner: "When I spoke of connections between artists, art and cosmic vibrations in the last time, I could not guess that life itself offers a very interesting cosmic spectacle, when the Schumaker comet slams into Jupiter, and we are indeed fortunate that we have a possibility to analyse, what anyone did or sensed or dreamed about in the days of the explosion. The paintings produced in those days are a trace of this explosion."
For me, the cross of small paintings was the most intriguing among Owe's works. The zigzag movement seems familiar and the artist assures that the moon, sun and cypresses constitute a similar bent motif on Van Gogh's night landscapes. France lures Owe Büttner: "In any case I plan to visit Southern France in the autumn of this year." The artist announced that in October there will be his major exhibition in Sigtuna Stiftelsen complex in Sweden. Owe Büttner's paintings have been in Turku Cultural Centre over a year and so he figured that it would make no sense of bringing them home in the meantime.
Not everybody can take a vacation in summer. Those, who can, may enjoy the fruits of summer work: in the present case, the paintings on the wall.