Showroom
Studio visit
Talk25 in German
Exhibition video
Catalogue video
Opening: 10th of January 2020 6 – 9 pm
Duration: 11th of January – 23rd of February 2020
Ending: 23th of February 2020 6 – 9 pm
In the solo show “graue_sinfonie” Bernhard Paul once again shows which worlds can be opened up by serial brushstrokes. For the first time, the works of his new series “agens” (lat. “driving”) are on display. The paintings painted in oil consist exclusively of the colours cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white. This series is named after the attempt to “drive the colours into grey” during the painting process. The result is a grey that is never homogeneous, but rather has an effect precisely through the gradients. Paul repeats this process of making again and again – until the picture shows him the qualities that determine the end of the painting process. The concentrated regularity of the “final strokes” define the artist’s personal pictorial language.
The principle of the series accompanies Bernhard Paul through his entire creative period. Both his oeuvre itself and each painting itself is serial in design and follows ever-repeating principles. In this systematic repetition and variation of brushstrokes, colour gradients, lines and structures are created, which develop into a beat or rhythm. It is not surprising that Paul seeks inspiration in music. The representatives of the so-called “new music” changed the perception and aesthetics of music through a new approach, and the gradual abandonment of major-minor tonality up to twelve-tone music. Bernhard Paul takes composers like Wolfgang von Schweinitz and John Cage as a source of inspiration for his painting. The result, however, is not an illustration of what is heard, rather the painter is oriented towards making dissonance, multi-dimensionality, flatness and depth visible.
The way in which the brushstrokes and the resulting traces of colour lead to extreme complexity can be seen particularly well in the works of the series “softcades”. The wide traces of colour, placed one inside the other and one on top of the other, create a two-dimensional colour effect, which is supported by the chosen horizontal formats and intensifies the impression of cut-out detail. The “interlude” series, inspired by the music of John Cage, also has a multi-layered effect by making the brush stroke visible. With parallel vertical brush strokes, colour tone by colour is built up next to each other on the canvas. Starting from a grey surface, the painter strokes with the brush to the edge of the picture. In this way, the traces of colour are sometimes more, sometimes less intense on the picture and a pictorial horizon is created.
The pictures from the series “modus” fall out of the frame at first sight. But perhaps it is precisely in this series inspired by Wolfgang von Schweinitz that Bernhard Paul pursues his approaches most radically. The paintings, painted with black acrylic paint on untreated canvas, correspond to a “supposedly comprehensible painting process”. Each brush stroke is carried out to the edge of the image. The ever-thinner colour trace thus also leaves underlying intersecting colour traces visible. These straight brushstrokes create a network of lines, to which the depth of the picture, impressions of balance and imbalance as well as the composition of the picture are subject as quality criteria.
During the painting process Paul reacts to creases and folds in the canvas fabric, which influence the motif and composition of the picture. What particularly appeals to the artist is the concentration in which the entire painting process increases. No brush stroke can be undone or painted over. An “unfavourably” painted brush stroke can only be distracted or reinterpreted by further brush strokes.
Bernhard Paul manages to make the picture grow out of its two-dimensionality. Not only through the creation of a rhythm and a surface that is pierced by depth or through the perception of a shimmering that arises in the viewer, but above all through the disclosure of the painting process itself. Through this traceability of the painting process, a further level is created through the trace of the paint, which lies beyond the painted picture surface and opens worlds for the viewer.
