19 Jun 2009

Paul Schwer at Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer

PAUL SCHWER
'BLAST IN THE BOX'

Paul Schwer (*1951) lives and works in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Kunstakademie under Erwin Heerich. Among the notable solo exhibitions in recent years have been those at Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen (2004), the Kunsthalle at Lingen (2006), Museum Schloss Moyland (2008), the Imperial Abbey of Kornelimünster near Aachen (2008) and Ludwig Museum, Koblenz (2009).

Having shown 'Baozis & Boards' (2004) and 'Maoming Lu' (2007), Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer now follows with an interior environment which the artist has entitled, 'Blast in the Box'.

Since the 1990s, driven by an experimental inquisitiveness, Paul Schwer has been pursuing a consistent quest for his own concept of painting. In the area between the poles of painting and sculpture his interest, as Stephan Berg ascertains in an essay on Schwer, revolves around the interlocking of colour, space, light and movement.

The environment, Blast in the Box, has in a sense lifted the painting from the canvas, the surface, the wall, and has made it a spatially tangible, walk-in experience.

Of the exhibition at Schloss Agathenburg in 2009, Maria Müller writes, 'The materials used here speak the unadorned language of the builder's yard – of square timber, scaffolding parts, fluorescent tubes with warm and cold light, wiring systems, power points and so on. Mounted on dye-impregnated timbers, the fluorescent tubes enclasp the space like a teeming swarm of fish, they converge and take the eye to individual pieces of furniture installed to float between floor and ceiling.'

With the sagaciously bluff manner of Schwer's procedure leaving every juncture visible and openly articulating the manner of the work's making, with no tricks, no chasing after effects, he keeps his spatial colour field from the hazards of culinary elegance.

Paul Schwer is engaged in elaborating a pictorial programme of the momentary and so, too, the beauty of his pictorial spaces is always a temporary one. – Their radiance and glow comes from a power point, a painting with a live charge but that stops dead as soon as the plug is disconnected.

His work celebrates the ephemeral – raw, brute, teetering and awry, provisional and forever imperfect.