This large-scale painting features a nuanced grey colour palette ranging from somber, deep and almost dark-blue to lighter and brighter shades of grey turning into subtle reddish purple and golden glimmers. Despite its total absence of figurative motives and of perspective, - Greyliner
unclearly evokes a cloudy sky seen from below, a foggy weather or a cool and misty oceanic scenery. If - The Monk by the Sea
painted in 1810 by Caspar David Friedrich is characterised by its audacious inclusion of a small-scale figure in a stormy and overwhelming landscape, thus emphasizing the insignificance and vulnerability of the human being, Biberstein goes further by completely eliminating all discernible, recognizable and manifest elements from the flat and hermetic “landscape”.

Thus, the artwork immerses its viewers in a melancholic, ethereal and auratic atmosphere where the gaze, confronted with a permanent smoke screen or more likely with a thick and dense fog, cannot reach anything else. The lack of visibility can be understood whether as an invitation to a transcendental journey into the unknown or to an introspective and silent meditation. As in front of an abstract-expressionism colour-field (which greatly influenced Biberstein's artistic development), the viewer can experience the emotional effects produced by the chromatic vibrating painted space and internally fuse with it.

Through his large paintings, Biberstein explored the ambivalence between the immateriality and the ephemeral phenomena depicted and the materiality of the medium, as he also delicately blurred the boundaries between inwardness and exteriority, expression and emptiness, abstraction and representation. In this late work (the artist died the following year, while planning the paintings for the ceiling of Santa Isabel church in Lisbon), the dominance of the grey palette and the density of the layered composition confere the painting some kind of tragic and moving tonality.

KS