10 Questions with Gerhard Petzl

Born 1973, in Graz, Austria, Gerhard Petzl lives & works between Vevey, Switzerland and Kalsdorf/Graz, Austria.

He is a visual artist who works with bronze, stone, wood, mixed media, and chocolate and does not limit himself to any medium, technique, or shape. The exploration is the journey that brings him into unexplored areas and self-discoveries. He sails between 2D visuals, the classical way of drawings on paper or digital, and 3D sculptures and ends up often even in the field of Science.

Pioneer of the "Chocolate crystals art", he is also the publisher of three chocolate art books. He received eight gold medals in international competitions and over 21 awards, and appeared in over 250+ publications, exhibitions, and on TV around the globe.

His motto is "Look inside yourself until you find true beauty."

www.gerhardpetzl.gallery | @choco4uall

INTERVIEW

First of all, you were trained as a Pastry Chef and Chocolatier. How much did this training help you going into visual art? 

Maybe a bit, as it was all about techniques, processes, costs, and material science. As an artist, you need to know and use all of those elements as well.

When did you first realize you wanted to become an artist? And what inspired you to pursue this career? 

After having created quite a lot of showpieces in chocolate and sugar, I wanted to learn more about art in general and decided to sign up for the "Masterclasses of Art & Design - section sculpturing" to learn more about technical and artistic approaches, art history, and mould making, like when you learn a normal hands-on profession.

What is your personal aim as an artist? And how has it evolved over the years? 

The goal is self-expression, discovering new territories, financial success, and, of course, sharing the artworks with as many people as possible. It has evolved gradually, and I am very grateful for that. And hopefully, there will be many more artworks to come in the future to share with you.

You work with several different mediums and techniques. How would you define yourself as an artist? 

Fluid, hard to define, and with no fixed shape - like chocolate. The more you learn, the more you discover yourself, and it also allows you to learn more about emotions, what YOU actually like, and what defines you as an artist. What colour scheme you like to use. But personally, I try to remain like a child with open eyes - whatever material you put into my hands or mind - I will work with it and create an artwork out of it. One example: After my Sunday breakfast, when I enjoyed soft-boiled eggs, I stacked the empty egg shells together, I loved the way the shells' edges and shadows looked like a misty landscape, so I started to create the "eggshell tower sculpture ", made out of many egg shells. Now it exists in original egg shells and in acrylic resin. It will exist very soon as a standing light lamp and shortly even in bronze for eternity. The eggshell tower will live for millennia to come. You see, one idea, four different media solutions, and I don't care about the question of whether the hen or the egg was first. All I know is that I care about the eggshells.

Tell us more about your work with chocolate. How did you first start incorporating this medium into your production? And what are the differences and similarities compared to working with other traditional mediums, like wood or bronze? 

Chocolate is very fragile, versatile, and difficult to work with. After having created 100+ chocolate sculptures, I had a strong desire to create a piece of art that lasts longer than the lifespan of edible materials. One aspect is to enjoy the beauty of the moment and live only for the moment, leaving nothing behind after your death. The other aspect is to think about what will happen with your artworks in bronze about 3,000 years in the future. Will they be buried in the forest, or will they be found on the ocean ground? What will be their story? I will probably never find out, but thinking about the endless possibilities is also creating a "mind-journey" that can be enjoyed now, besides the visual aspect and beauty of the artwork, of course. Technically, having worked with chocolate for many years, I discovered that working with wax is almost the same - it is a fat-based medium - or with Paraffin or cocoa butter, it doesn't matter. But the experimental journey is totally different! I also love to create the wax models for the bronze sculpture, bring them to the foundry, and do all the finishing works myself afterward. I love to experience all the sanding, polishing, etc., firsthand myself, and it is totally different than working with chocolate. Physically way more demanding, but as an artist, I love to "stand behind" my artworks rather than just ordering them via a drawn sketch like many other big names out there are doing it.

Where do you get inspiration for your work? And what inspires you to create? 

Most artworks come intuitively into my mind, and I like working without sketches, which was a nightmare for my art professors. I always created the artwork first, and then I drew a sketch of it afterward to please them. Nature itself and different cultures are a great inspiration for me as I love to discover things. After I had worked with chocolate for over 20 years professionally, I discovered "chocolate crystals "as an art form and spent years exploring them in thousands of macro-photography images and samples from all over the world; I even published a book about them. If you look up to the stars and you zoom out, you will see galaxies and universes. It is the same in the world of chocolate crystals. The closer I zoom in, the more galaxies I discover. It is the same as what Egyptians and Mayans already mentioned a long time ago - everything is mirrored. What appears big in the sky exists in small on earth. That experience led me to intensify my works in a new category: "Mirrored World Editions" where I mirror everything from baby strollers, and plants to drawings and artworks and thereby not only create new images and objects but this also opened up a door to get a glimpse of a new universe.

What is your creative process like? And how did you evolve this way of working? 

This is a very general question to which I have no response for all media I am working with. As mentioned before, I like to work intuitively with chocolate and carve objects mostly out of a solid blocks. In mixed media, I often start working on objects without thinking too much and let them rest for a while or sometimes for years before I continue to finally finish it, when I feel the time is right to do so. In digital media, I experiment a lot with digital tools, and sometimes I even create old-fashioned collages but only digitally on my PC with different photos of my personal image pool rather than cutting them out from magazines on paper, as they were done originally. My art evolves as I get older, and I reckon every hundred+ artworks, I develop a new style, or I find something new which really speaks to me emotionally. Then I continue that way for the next years to come or until I feel the topic is explored sufficiently for myself.

Is there a piece you consider a "breakthrough" in your career? 

There are actually two, "The Chocolate Crystals", and "Mirrored World Editions". The chocolate crystals because there are probably 100,000 Chocolatiers out there globally, and no one ever has explored further chocolate bloom or chocolate crystals, as I call them. I worked at the "Chocolate Center of Excellence" and asked my expert colleagues about the chocolate crystals and how to control them visually. All I got as a reply was: "They are our enemy. We don't want to work with them - we need to fight them to make them go away". Well, that was one of the trigger moments when I knew I didn't want to swim in the same direction as a fish in a swarm. I had to find a way to prepare the ideal environment for the crystals to grow to achieve what I had in mind. All the other professional Chocolatiers globally (I was also awarded as "Master chocolatier of the year" in NY, US) had no time or desire to explore them further, which means, as an artist, I had to do that. It is also funny as it was absolutely contradictory to my profession. Now, ten years later, I know it was absolutely worth it, and I am very happy today that I dared to "fight" for them as they brought me a lot of joy. 

The mirrored images are also a similar approach, to create images mirrored with objects you know. By doing so, you create a new dimension of seeing, and I often ask myself whether our brain is not developed enough yet to see mirrored as a normal way of seeing things. Sometimes I feel by doing so, I get a glimpse of an open door into a new reality and another unexplored universe. And it already led me to discover that there are lots of university researches and hypotheses about the existence of parallel universes and mirrored dimensions, meaning - you exist in multiple universes in parallel. I can totally relate to that as I feel the same as I walk with my artistic approaches through multiple reality doors, and I am more than happy to share them with you via my website. 

You have a long and successful career, and you have also won numerous prizes over the years. What is your favorite experience as an artist so far? 

Working in a gallery located in a luxury shopping mall in Hong Kong, directly at the Harbour, and looking at the waterfront at midnight with your team and knowing that no one else was in the building, was quite cool. We had a private clubbing with loud music and really enjoyed working there, sometimes until sunrise. These are the kind of experiences you cannot buy with money, as those locations are closed for everyone else after opening hours. The artwork turned out to be a masterpiece, but the journey of getting there was exhausting - but totally fun! I guess that's the ideal stage of being an artist - living in the ZEN-moment!

What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

I am always working on multiple projects in parallel. At the moment, I am working on a giant chocolate artwork for Germany, multiple bronze sculptures to be done in Austria, I am in the middle of a planning stage of new world-record-sized artwork in the Middle East for 2023, and I am participating in art exhibitions in London, UK, Italy, Romania, and the US. While I'm on the run, I am creating lots of new "Mirrored world Editions" in different art media on my notebook.

And lastly, what is one piece of advice you would give to an emerging artist? 

I don't need to give advice. True artists will never give up and overcome obstacles and doubters, financial constraints, and uncertainties until they see the bright light of sunshine and success at the end of the tunnel. If there is no light at the end of the tunnel, there are still artworks that might be seen and discovered by someone, which is also very beautiful to know. Your journey, emotions, and happiness by creating the artworks belong 100% to you, and no one else can take those experiences from you.