Kunstforum Hermann Stenner, Bielefeld:

Bodies in fine ribs, people struggling out of sweaters, clothes strewn carelessly on the floor: Textiles play an important role in the work of painter Cornelius Völker. He paints tea towels hanging from kitchen hooks like abstract color field paintings in space. His still lifes of bottles and pictures of cocktails show high-proof “good stuff”. There is also a series with drugs such as crack, cocaine or crystal meth, which are often colloquially referred to as “dope”. And there is “reading material”, the culturally more positively connoted addictive substance, represented by Völker in his images of stacks of books.

However, “material” is not only a direct or metaphorical main motif in his works; rather, materiality fundamentally determines Völker's painting process. Pastose layers of paint and seemingly transparent parts of the picture alternate on the fabric ground of his painting, the canvas. What from a distance appears clearly fixable as a tweed skirt becomes an informal, gestural painting when viewed close up. The unruliness of his seemingly inconspicuous motifs in contrast to his elegantly opulent painting is what makes his pictorial world so fascinating.