For László Lakner, language is material for his work. Its sensually tangible forms, writing as well as sound, are depicted in multi-layered relationships between painting and text, image and writing, communication and understanding. Lakner works historically. Material legacies of history become the occasion for images. Here, it is not the major events that come to the fore, but traces are sought, selected or imagined that stand apart from historiography. Letters, manuscripts, marginal notes and similar marginalia form the first occasion for a painting through their visual formal appeal of handwriting. By transforming the written image into a written image, Lakner sketches portrait features of a person. The artist's interest is always ignited by what is personally unmistakable about the collected originals. The personality of a well-known literary figure that shimmers out of the writing, the note, the poem collage, but especially the corrected text, the characteristics of distinctiveness and individuality tempt Lakner to appropriate the original image as a model. Linguistic and visual communication complement each other, merge with each other and formulate a complexion of the various historical perspectives and references. (Text: Dirk Teuber)