With "Ground language", the German artist Paul Wesenberg presents a new exhibition of 12 works produced especially for the occasion. In it, he raises the question of a strong, essential plastic language, devoid of all artifice, while continuing his reflection on the practice of painting in the 21st century. Everything is focused on the surface of the canvas, an ambiguous space that is both the support for an image with undefined contours and the terrain where the artist's reflection on painting is played out. The materiality of this surface is just as important as the creative process, the line and the colour. The finished work becomes the witness to this.
This is Paul Wesenberg's second solo show at Galerie RX.


Monumentality and subtlety emerge from Paul Wesenberg's works, which are immediately met with confusion. If at first glance his canvases appear as pieces of landscapes dear to the artist or windows opening onto natural spaces that could invade the gallery walls, the closer one gets to them, the more one realizes that the surface of the canvas is the other subject of the painting. It is not smooth, on the contrary: it is both flayed and "augmented" with pieces of painted canvas. This is due to Paul Wesenberg's own technique.

Attacking the canvas, literally
With a preparatory drawing as small as a matchbox as his starting point, he transfers not the drawing in a mimetic way, but the energy that emerges from this drawing. Hence the importance of the line, the backbone of the painting and the seismograph that translates this energy. From there, the artist attacks the canvas in both the literal and figurative sense. With a sort of miniature drill, which one cannot help but compare to that of a dentist, he assaults the canvas, digs it, cuts it, makes holes in it. It is therefore not surprising that, in addition to the classic brushes and tubes of oil paint, the artist's studio contains a mini drill, cutters, tweezers and various glues. This last operation has no turning back and carries with it a tension that forces the artist to be in the very moment, in the time of creation.

Fragments of a painter
Then he adds his "oil skins", as he calls them, the remains of fragments specially prepared in advance for each painting. In this way he anchors the work in colour and material. It is only the superimposition and interaction between the layers that reveals hidden images, while playing on the raw canvas. The grey background is part of the image and the perception of space. If his works refer to specific places (as the titles indicate), the artist interprets them through the filter of sensation, leaving the impression of a memory of a place recreated by the mind. As one delves into Paul Wesenberg's world, dualities emerge: destruction and construction, disappearance and appearance of the image, deletion and addition, abstraction and figuration. He condenses all of this on the surface of the canvas, which he disturbs and brings to life: he wounds it, attacks it, scarifies it, all terms that evoke the human skin.

Ground language

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