...My painting emerges like an alphabet. Just as you can put letters together to create a word, a form emerges from a spot of paint. It is an organic combination of elements that take shape while the work is in the making. In the process of developing a work, I discover the object or subject that begins to emerge ... Then memory, or the unconscious, enters the scene and what I have developed takes shape. From this process the image comes into being......So I am a creator and that could be my genesis. There are works that come into being and take a course of development that is already contained in the first strokes, in the first colour combinations, while others emerge so fully formed that I cannot continue without revealing their secret.

Karl Plattner

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Born and formed between the two great cultures of the West, the Northern and the Mediterranean, Plattner also believes in the signs of the civilisation of the forest and the temple, of the tree and the stone, preserving both the taste for the symbol whether as the heritage of dark legends or as the product of the sunshine of thought, arched in the eddies of tangled vegetation or stretched out in the brilliant cadences of metaphysical luminosity. To illustrate his love of the symbol, Plattner paints not people but signs of humanity; he presents us not with objects but with allusive situations that, even if they are places of solitary deeds, ultimately reflect relationships of indeterminate extent. This is evident both in the minutiae of life – the female figure caught in an intimate pose, for example, or an indifferent face surprised in the glimmer of a window –as well as in a flurry of activity expanded in the vastness of the fresco. Even in the most solid and most lucid compositions, enclosed within the confines of seemingly impenetrable structures and caught in an extremely defined interplay of spaces, they resonate with echoes of unreconciled forms, sublime to the point of obsession through the process in which inside and outside penetrate each other and interact.
Franco Solmi, Karl Plattner, 1973, monography

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Plattner’s painting does not reveal much about the chronology of his work. If we disregard the experiments at the beginning of the 1950s, when the artist took the avant-garde of the time as a yardstick – especially Cubism, if viewed from the critical perspective of a post-war artist – then Plattner’s oeuvre represents a thematically and artistically perfectly homogeneous corpus that hardly reveals any chronological or stylistic discontinuities. Consistently identical forms and content are in fact a constant feature in his painting, which revolves, as it were, in continuous recurrence around a problem for which there is no solution and which therefore leads to existential crises that always break out anew.

Time is neither able to diminish nor to develop the subjective perception of his own self and of his themes. And it is even less capable of affecting Plattner’s objective understanding of art, which over three decades remains coherently anchored in a realistic mode of representation and is accompanied by an iron professional discipline. It is precisely this process of painting that is the most important and probably also the most immediate mark of the quality of his work, which begins in the forties with rigorous years of apprenticeship as a fresco painter and is then gradually both technically and artistically refined – to the point of that extraordinary familiarity with technique that characterises not only his painting but also drawing, watercolour, lithography and pastel. As an experienced artist, Plattner shapes all these artistic areas with such diversity of expression that the choice of medium becomes absolutely secondary.

In Plattner’s work, there is therefore no hierarchy: whether it is on canvas or paper, whether it is a patiently executed oil painting that only takes on artistic form over the course of weeks and months, sometimes even years, or a quickly sketched pastel or pencil drawing in fluid lines and warm colours – everything is equally important, everything is permeated by the same passionate quest. […]

Plattner’s work on canvas was characterised by caution and passion in equal measure. He worked on the material of the background for a long time, only to put the painting away again for just as long a time. But then, all of a sudden, he would bring it out again and fall in love with the work anew when a figure, or better still, some facial feature, would emerge from the surfaces that had been prepared according to the old techniques, and begin to take on a life of its own in the artist's imaginative world, giving rise to associations with figures that demanded to have life and destiny breathed into them. […] Plattner approached this equally wonderful and unpredictable revival of form with astonishing determination. However, he only allowed a new work to emerge from it when the artist's idea coincided completely with that image that gradually crystallised out of the shapeless background.

Gabriella Belli, Capolavori, MART 1996

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Subsequently, I became aware that Karl was basically a nomadic soul: whenever we met, he was either coming from somewhere or about to set off to somewhere else. He would only stay, mostly due to work commitments, in one place for long enough to prepare for the next move. In the course of time, it became clear to me that something was driving him on, like the wandering gypsies from the Vinschgau, and it was always drawing him away, into the distance, in search of his own self, something that forced him to rediscover his own origins wherever he went, but which also caused him to listen more carefully and to reflect, indeed even to understand. We all experience contradictions within ourselves, but in Plattner’s works and personality a recurring anxiety came to light, the consternation of the inquiring human, a tortured consistency when doubting alleged certainties and affirmed truths. From time to time, he may have been dominated by thoughts and feelings that could have displaced him in relation to a natural subject. Viewed in an objective light, the subject could have been reinvented through modifications, for it is hard to imagine that landscapes, scenes, people and animals in his paintings would not have reflected his world view.

Pier Luigi Siena, The public works, Museion 1996