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From the art-relevant details of Peter Wechsler’s biography we can gather that he works as a drawer and intaglio graphic artist. There are only a few references in-between that he creates oil paintings. If his oeuvre is sometimes described as a painterly one, then this is true to the extent that the artist is familiar with color and knows how to use it. Yet first and foremost it relates to the fact that in his approach color emerges stealthily, as it were, when he is drawing. Before he decides whether he is to work with or without color, a certain sensuality sets in as a sensitive movement, there is impulse and gesture.
One has to place the world in the subject, so that the subject is for the world.
"… all, however, let painting emerge from the shadow of a person drawn with lines" This is how Plinius the Elder describes the way the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans envisioned the origin of painting. In another passage, he cites a fable which is later referred to as the story about the invention of painting. This remark is necessary, as the fable does in fact describe the invention of sculpture. The episode on painting appears to have been thrown in for good measure:
A darkness, as if opening up by its own accord, lays itself over a structure of partly velvety, partly seemingly shining lines and strokes, a transparency, in which bundles of lines appear neither light nor heavy, yet they achieve utmost saturation, a pictorial space that curves both inwards and outwards, bends, meshes, opens up – in outlining characterisation – the figure of the picture
Peter Wechsler`s works which you see here, dry point etchings, have, by way of preamble as it were, an indication of the time spent on them by the artist: he worked at these prints from 1976 to 2001. That was a great surprise for me to start with, the first resulting from my encounter with this group of works which is exhibited here.
Burghart Schmidt linear textures | spatial surfaces"> Read more …
Perhaps one is at the edge of definition, where the artist’s abstraction turns into the observer’s constructive thought pattern connecting the tiny interwoven constructions in the field of vision to micro- and macrostructures. This handwriting’s high degree of abstraction in flight crystallizes into poetry. A bird’s eye view turns landscapes of foreign stars into recorded history. Unknown time dimensions.
Roswitha Ennemoser Notiz notes or flyer on Peter Wechsler"> Read more …