PAUL SCHWER "MAOMING LU"

Paul Schwer (born in Hornberg/Black Forest, 1951) completed his studies in painting at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1988 as a Meisterschüler (≈ MFA) under Erwin Heerich. His most important exhibitions in recent years have included Blast at the Kunstverein in Hanover (2004) and shows at Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen (also 2004), at the Kunsthalle, Bremerhaven (2005), and at the Kunsthalle, Lingen (2006). At Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, we follow Baozis und Boards (2004) with a selection of more recent and brand new works including two more Baozis and four stele pieces, under the heading, Maoming Lu.

Driven by an experimental curiosity, Schwer’s is artist’s research in progress, consistently pursued, exploring colour between the two poles of painting and sculpture.

That exploration began for Schwer in the early 1990s, when he gradually let go of the ideal of the classical panel painting, choosing instead to refract it into its parameters of colour, light, space, time, matter, finiteness and the presentation or representation of a subject or theme; and then proceeding to test these factors for their sustainability and their limits. Both the substance of paint and its support are tried out in a number of variants – in hybrid positions transcending genre boundaries, mostly as interior installations, the artist calls reams of cloth, polyester foil, sheets of glass, Plexiglas and PET-G into play, coating them in acrylic paint and silkscreen inks and a mixture of buttermilk and pigment. The support material remains identifiable as a quote from the two-dimensional monochrome colour field even where it is crumpled, distorted under the influence of heat or integrated into an architectonic structure. When it comes to presenting the outcome in an exhibition space Schwer essays the entire potential lying in the relationship of ceiling, floor and wall – planes in parallel, oblique tilting, diagonal traversing, a marking of points in a space or room. These works’ assertion in their spatial context by how physical contact occurs, the interlocking of the reality of the work with the reality of the ambient space and its dialectic of inside/outside are central issues for Schwer. The quest is less for created form as a solid, unambiguous body in space than for colour and its thereness as a quality become as autonomous as possible, ideally as coloured light. To remain perceivable for the viewer, it is bound to support and body, but in the translucency of the materials and the open construction as a dynamic or planar skin of colour, it can attain a maximum of dematerialisation. Its differentiating or interacting reaction to a space becomes articulate in the alternation between matt and mirror-glossy, concave and convex surfaces, and in the principle of staggering or layering several semi-transparent planes of material.

Maoming Lu – a title as exotic as it is onomatopoeic – plays on Paul Schwer’s three-month stay in Shanghai on a Degussa visiting artist working grant. Thus, alongside the steles with the titles, Noldes Garten and Papenburg (270/250 cm respectively, x 30 x 30 cm; 2005), the present show includes two works whose titles mark the change of location, Jinmao-Tower and Xijang Nanlu. These cuboid, fragile sculptures lean against the wall as a loose group, at varying degrees of tilt. They consist of acrylic glass sheet partially pasted from behind with black-and-white digital prints and painted with acrylic paint or silkscreen ink and pigment in an expressive hand. Inside, visible from the outside, a neon tube has been installed. With the light on, the colours gain luminosity and the hard contours of the architectonic shape dissolve, ceding to an atmospheric manifestation of colour and light. Papenburg and Noldes Garten operate with naturalistic blue-green tones, altogether unlike Jinmao-Tower and Xijang Nanlu with their stark, almost virulent contrasts between bright pink and turquoise; an orange that dances before one’s eyes, indigo and green. The photographs, reflections of the present in urban China, combine with the shots of ships and gardens on the representational plane in Paul Schwer’s oeuvre – where illustrations are made machine-aided and are subordinate to the complex fabric of other aspects woven by a work-indwelling (and working) reality that is transitory, apt to change from moment to moment and dependent on whatever vantage-point pertains. The photographs also play the part of a topographical record and a biographical note; they admit location (taken verbally) and the recording of a motion between locations. The linear colour-light sculptures fathom the space around, contrasting in the same space with the two organically amorphous, volume-precipitating Baozis of painted and moulded panels of acrylic glass or PET-G. Whereas one of these works, in red and blue, is assembled directly on the ground, the other, a composition of orange, red purple and green, floats in the air suspended on its mounting and spotlights the lightness that is profoundly Schwer’s aim.

Gabriele Wurzel

The Private View is on Friday, March 9, from 6 pm to 9 pm. Exhibition to April 14, 2007

The Gallery is open Tuesday – Friday 12 noon – 6 pm, Saturday 12 noon – 4 pm; and by appointment