Paolo Rizzi wrote about him in 1990

Goethe during his journey in Italy wrote: “ I made a picture of everything I had seen” So great was his “greed” to see. Something like that must have happened to Heinz J. Düll. This painter of Czechoslowak origin and German cultural formation, curious about Humanism, feel so deeply in love with the roman countryside to decide to settle there. He followed in many Nordic people’s footsteps who had been attracted to Italy by the spell of culture, the search of a climate imbued with classicism and mythology. We can say today that what characterizes Düll is his ability to insert his Nordic spirit (I should say Gothic) into the dimension of the Italian landscape.


Gothic reminiscences mingle with dilatations after the manner of Leonardo, so that two cultures that may seem entirely different, the German Gothic and the Italian Renaissance, seem to mingle and reach almost the limit of a suggestive existential ambiguity. This gives use a sort of psychological bewildered uneasiness. The strain toward the romantic Sublime almost swells, assumes surprising and unusual references. The “quotations” (for instance Santa Teresa by Bernini), the stones by Bomarzo) are full of mysterious meanings that may have a spiritual origin or an erotic basis. In effect such sensation is a part of the cultural dualism into which Düll’s aesthetics is immersed. Mutatis mutandis, the way is the same for Dürer who gets in touch with the Italian classicism but is still imbued with the Teutonic spirit of his Gothic style. Düll adds to it all the culture of Mannerism (exposing his work to the peril of Surrealism). It is an adventurous journey that the steersman must undertake with great skill resisting the allurements of too many Sirens. The result is a picture and a drawing that, even involved in cultural veils, preserve their own characteristic, an always vibrating expressive quality. We are captured above all by certain evanescent romantic views, where the drawing is unmistakably spirited, or by certain watercolours where the subject (it may be outline of Orvieto or the profile of Bolsena Lake, or even the astonished smile of a woman) is distorted, becoming a psychologic anger, psychic magma.