SLAG Gallery presents "Wanderlust", featuring new works by Paul Wesenberg, from April 14 to May 14, 2022.
Born in Minsk, Belarus, in 1973, Paul Wesenberg currently lives and works in Berlin, he expresses a particular interest in the materiality of paint and canvas. His themes revolve around the essence of painting, the specifics of color and texture, landscape and natural phenomena, and wounds and miracles.
His approach reveals a nostalgic originating point and an irrepressible desire to display the claim and autonomy of the painting as opulently as possible in a present that no longer knows any binding patterns of meaning. The free-swinging of his forms, here chaotic in the form agglomeration, there chiseled with emphasis on lines, on the one hand massively thickened in color, on the other hand carelessly fluid, turns his pictures into sensual event zones.
Paul Wesenberg enjoys experimenting and has developed his techniques. The use of double canvases, sometimes brutal cuts, and roughened surfaces gives his works aesthetic appeal. Precisely cut oilskins are applied to specific areas of the painting to reinforce the diversity of the surface relief and enhance the color experience. The oilskins are transformed into new color structures like particles governed by their own ordering principle.
Wesenberg's paintings often have an elegiac trait. With the exhibition title "Wanderlust," the artist emphasizes, on the one hand, his connection to the fundamental and still living tradition of German Romanticism and, on the other hand, his vote for the "open picture," which counteracts the conventional treatment of canvas. The canvas' wounding, opening, and breaking through underscores Wesenberg's longing for inwardness, for something beyond, for exploring the picture's depth and essence and human existence, whose vulnerability is revealed more than ever today.