My first meeting with the artist was some years ago, when a person I hold in very high esteem, Mrs. Carla Canali, introduced him to me. Her wish was that I should meet a German artist who, in spite of his talents, would have liked to see a greater appreciation of his artistic capacities.

I met him in my study, we talked for a long time, and he timidly faced my ritual test— introspective, he showed me some of his works, he talked about music, his family, of his painting classes for the Regional Park of Veii, north of Rome, and about his love of jazz music.

It was a wonderful morning and it was easy to accept becoming his art critic and starting a partnership which I hope will last until the end of my days.

Who Gerhard Schwarz is was clear when I proposed that he work together with other artists in a collective event at the Museo Venanzo Crocetti, where he presented two magnificent works painted extemporaneously in the Parco di Veio: medium-sized paintings which however possessed a powerful depth of execution, in which his inspiring love and respect for his subjects was evident.

Thereafter, at the Accademia di Romania, in an exhibition-event called “Jazz Art’’, the artist not only presented two other masterpieces but also gave a concert on the electric guitar, sending his audience into raptures.

I had the pleasure of hosting his paintings in my gallery but also of following him in other, very successful exhibitions, the last of them being an exhibition in the museum in Formello, where his works towered next to his artistic personality.

Gerhard Schwarz is a humble artist, cultivated and competent, with a real painter’s talent. In addition to cultivating a painstaking love of the landscape, as a lover of Renaissance art, he directs his painterly research to the Via Francigena, for which a specific exhibition is under preparation with the intent to restore the road to its former fame. We are talking about that path trod by British-French-Italian pilgrims desirous to meet the heir of Saint Peter, an adventurous route full of woods which would become embellished by works of art.

These wishes and this culture of knowledge have made it possible for Schwarz's paintings to embellish themselves with images of the Park of Veii and with a warm palette (as opposed to a cold or neutral one), creating the vibrating aesthetic synergies of great value which characterise his powerful artistic personality.

His work is not a mechanical or slavish repetition of the subjects ‘Park of Veii - Via Francigena - Bracciano Lake' but the concordance of a contemporary artist who walks on the road of Art with his own wisdom and insights, leaving the mark of a painterly genius able to walk the line of poetry, as his vocation as painter tells him to do, be his subjects woods, rivers, or lakes. His human commitment is spiritual and self-conscious, and gives the viewer a fresh joie de vivre, through a creative process of guided interpretation.

Brushstrokes that appear as real feelings coming from the soul, which place themselves on the canvas like musical notes on an invisible staff, but which know how to emerge and draw the gaze, attracted as it is by the luminousness radiated by their atmospheres, at times wistful and silent, at times alive with an astonishing subtleness of harmonies.

Gerhard's clear and legible sign is creating a mirror for a reality magically transferred to the canvas. Schwarz knows how to accompany his particular layering of colours, allowing light to become the sublime protagonist in a study that ventures into lost spaces and faraway times, to recount moments of repose and expressive innocence by way of an attractive realism, from which it draws strength.

His is a path made of commitment and sacrifice, but it has also been essential, having led him away from the simple though noble passion of painting, towards the sought-after aim of becoming a "Master of Art”. It has made him into a well-established painter (rightly so) and me satisfied to have been at his side in the past, to be here in the present, and even more so to continue to be with him in the future.

Giorgio Palumbi