Galerie Dutko

Originally, a multitude of shapes and figures, fantastic animals, symbolic images, fill the canvas, unfolding and stirring in petrified matter.

Max Wechsler voluntarily stops painting for a few years. The artist picks up brushes and canvas again but abandons figuration for good. He projects color and matter, covering the canvas with oblique stripes in lacerating gestures, like a writing that is repeated endlessly in sharp and unremitting strokes. His palette is reduced.

A new rupture : papers of all origins, fossilized by glue, replace paint and brush, invade the pictorial space in large compositions where paper, now the sole medium, is crumpled and cut in a tactile approach to matter.

Finally, the creative process focuses on a single material: print. Through reductions or enlargements, distortions to the extreme of typographic characters, Max Wechsler transforms all kinds of writings to create a universe where only the substance of the sign remains from the letter. The letters that surface as one approaches the work do not form a word. They are a sign. By opening up to the work, it is up to us to invent its meaning, explore the unrevealed, approach the enigma.

From this uninterrupted discourse, matter emerges.

Smooth or polished matter, made of leather, bronze or marble.

Matter that the artist sometimes tears to let the paper float with the breath of air like large shreds of memory.

The works of the last years are invaded by a more assertive light that absorbs us, like an invitation to penetrate the other side of the canvas towards the elsewhere of the outside.

Light, matter, primitive forms of life resonating at the dawn of his work.

This retrospective collection of unpublished works, some of which have never been shown before, retraces the journey of an artist who has never stopped searching and experimenting in the light of the studio on rue Popincourt where the scraps of paper still live and twirl on the floor.

Max Wechsler said: «Each finished surface is a springboard for what follows, and this sequence is like a filiation that feeds on what precedes».

The entire work of Max Wechsler resonates.

(Camille Maujean)

Exhibition from April 20 to May 28, 2023.