Return to Innocence: Matthias Kreher’s “Childhood” and the Poetics of Remembered Time
May 19, 2025
In a modest yet emotionally expansive acrylic composition, German artist Matthias Kreher captures the elusive essence of memory in Childhood—a painting that evokes the deep, internalized architecture of innocence, nostalgia, and the subtle violence of time. Rendered on MDF (medium-density fibreboard), Kreher’s choice of material betrays no accident. The industrial, muted surface becomes a deliberate foil to the vibrant emotional interior of the piece, echoing the fragile coexistence of resilience and impermanence embedded in the idea of childhood.
Kreher’s Childhood is not a literal rendering of youthful play or a sentimental tableau. Rather, it is a psychological landscape—an abstract geography shaped by blurred edges, symbolic voids, and gestural interruptions. The color palette is subdued, comprising mostly dusty ochres, pale blues, and earthy reds that do not jump off the board, but rather simmer within it. These colors feel lived-in, oxidized by memory. They do not scream joy; they whisper longing.
This tonal restraint is the artist’s way of resisting nostalgia’s deceitful brightness. Childhood, Kreher suggests, is not merely a lost paradise but a terrain of complexity, contradiction, and early reckonings with the self. The figure—if one can even call it that—is implied rather than depicted, maybe a background, maybe a silhouette, perhaps a faded outline of a child drawn in chalk and left to wash away in the rain. Its lack of clarity reinforces the unreliability of memory, especially when shaped by adult longing.
But what Childhood captures is not just a moment—it captures the feeling of a moment you can’t return to. In this way, it aligns with the German romantic tradition—not in the grand landscape manner of Caspar David Friedrich, but in the emotional contour of post-war modernists like Anselm Kiefer or Gerhard Richter. There is a post-industrial melancholy at work here, but it is subtle, filtered through the quiet language of abstraction rather than the declarative force of figuration.
Acrylic paint, in Kreher’s hands, becomes a time-travel device. It is not layered thickly in bravado, nor is it deployed with performative brushwork. Instead, it hovers—applied thinly in some places, scraped back in others. The MDF absorbs the paint rather than repels it, lending the surface a matte softness, like old photographs faded by sun and grief. There is something tactile in the work, almost like the smudge of a child’s hand left on a school window. It is both artifact and echo.
Kreher’s choice to avoid overt symbolism—no toys, no children, no settings—elevates the work. It denies the viewer easy entry and instead demands introspection. To look at Childhood is to excavate your own version of it. The painting does not tell you what childhood looked like; it asks what it felt like to forget it. In that space of shared dislocation, Kreher creates a deeply intimate encounter.
Born and based in Germany, Kreher’s practice is influenced by both the precision of Bauhaus sensibilities and the expressive liberation found in German Expressionism. His works often explore identity, memory, and collective consciousness, but Childhood feels especially personal. It is not bombastic. There are no sharp critiques, no political slogans, no loud gestures of dissent. Yet it is radical in its refusal to perform. In an art world often dominated by spectacle, Kreher’s quiet meditation on time, aging, and memory carries profound weight.
The work also raises a crucial question: What remains of childhood when one is no longer a child? In Childhood, the answer is more residue than relic—less narrative, more sensation. Like the faint scent of sun-drenched grass, or the sound of your mother’s voice from another room, half-heard and almost forgotten, it’s there and not there, flickering between presence and absence.
That duality—of having been and no longer being—is what gives the painting its charge. Viewers might initially think there is “nothing happening” in the frame. But the emotional event is internal. Kreher asks us to slow down, to let the work accumulate. And when it does, the painting becomes a mirror—not of the viewer’s face, but of their interior archive. It touches the wound and the wonder simultaneously.
Exhibited without ornate framing and often unaccompanied by lengthy wall text, Childhood is not meant to be dissected but rather experienced. It functions more like a poem than a picture. Every crack in the paint, every muted transition between colors, every grain of the MDF bleeds with meaning. It is the art of subtle devastation.
There’s also an environmental ethos in the materiality itself. MDF, often derived from reclaimed wood fibers, speaks to reuse, to the gathering of fragments into new forms—perhaps a quiet metaphor for how we assemble the story of our past from inconsistent, unreliable pieces. Kreher does not preach sustainability, but the painting’s foundation nods toward it: the use of what remains to shape what we remember.
In an age saturated by images of curated perfection—especially in relation to childhood as portrayed on social media—Kreher offers a counter-image. Not idealized. Not commodified. Not cute. Just real in its ambivalence, its texture, its soft ache. His work returns art to the realm of feeling, to the realm of the unsaid, where painting is not documentation but invocation.
Ultimately, Childhood by Matthias Kreher is not about childhood per se. It is about the human condition, about what it means to lose something you didn’t know you were losing until it was gone. It is about memory as both architecture and ruin. It is about the painter’s attempt to recover a state of being through gesture and color, even as he admits it cannot fully be retrieved.
And in that tension—between the reaching and the unreachable—Childhood becomes more than a painting. It becomes a quiet, persistent question: What part of us is still there, waiting to be remembered?
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