Whereas his precisely small-format objects occupy delicate colour spaces, pure abstraction tilts towards the world of things. Philipp Karl Moritz's reduced pictorial compositions negotiate both the inner relationship of pure colour and the integration or dissolution of the representational and the abstract. In the compositional design of surface and in his handling of the line, he explores fundamental questions of painting unanswered by Classical Modernism, which he often confronts with wit and skepticism – for example when he lets one of his chessboard grids slide down an inclined plane or encloses it in a roughly drawn rectangular line. The shiny, leathery materiality of his paintings and their pulsating surfaces, which the artist intensifies by rubbing in the top layers of oil for days on end while they are still damp for days, make Philipp Karl Moritz's works unique and anchor them in our fast-moving world. Treated in this way, shimmering, almost rushing, glossy surfaces emerge; the paintings glow as if saturated with light. But behind the shiny surface and its fetishizing effect, one is not awaited by the fulfillment of a brief happiness, but by the enigma of one's own location; for what is seen is not enough to permanently forget oneself; in the reflecting surfaces, the viewer eventually also finds himself, his own shadow.