"A weekend at Cantabile is an opportunity for those who want to escape the constraints of the ordinary. In this area in Tuscany, artists from all over the world gather to create pieces that preserve their great experiences. They use local ingredients and methods to create artwork that captures their feelings about the cities they have spent time in. Whether they were happy or sad, inspired or discouraged by their experience, they took something away from their time in Cantabile - something they will carry into future times."

This is an excerpt from a long text generated by a freely accessible AI text-generating website. The generator was given all the titles of the artworks by Manuel Schneidewind and Johannes Daniel in the exhibition "Dancing With My Father Again" and then it got started. In the quoted part above, the generator deals with the wonderful city of Cantabile in Italy, which of course does not exist, but it is close, because it is a performance instruction for instrumental music coming from Italian that requires imitating the human voice.

The blithely generating text generator was not able to let an inkling , a strong association , a trace emerge from fragments of the listed titles, which only lightly shines through hints from the chaotic structure and thus makes recognition possible.

In both artists, the fragment is superficial. Johannes fills his paintings with interlocking shimmering fragments, Manuel elevates a fragment to a whole or even allows the hint that it is a fragment to make it appear as a whole.

With both, one will get helplessly entangled in nonsense if one undertakes a reconstruction of the intention, since the big picture should not be hidden, rather the intention perhaps lies in the associative, to slowly see an association shining out of the mass of chaos, an inkling of something for which it is necessary to experience feelings, to gather experience, to have encounters and to find in them an allusion that coincides with those of the artists, because one is precisely not an AI but has the inner experience in common with the other people and shares it.

A friend of mine, while talking in the meadow, could almost incidentally see the one four-leaf clover with pinpoint accuracy and pick it out in the sea of shamrocks. Beauty, as in Manuel’s sculptures and Johannes’ paintings, arises from the absence of the superficial mind.

Thus, one can read the text created by both artists as an emotional tuning of the inner claviature in order to turn to the artworks with an open mind for their effect:


Every night I fall asleep this is all i ever dream

I see the man perform.
I see the man try and hide.
and sometimes I listen outside the door
lurking in the shadow of the good life

What is he hiding?

Dreaming a thought that could dream about a thought
That could think of the dreamer that thought
That could think of dreaming and getting a glimmer of God

Never dreamed that he would be gone from me.

Deliberate, slow, destructive defeat
The man can boast of little happiness that does not enjoy the blessing of a friend,
the intimate sympathy of a fellow mind, a dance partner.

If I could get another chance.
I'd play a song that would never end