Paul Schwer - Baozis & Boards

Paul Schwer (*1951 Hornberg, Black Forest) was already a qualified medical doctor when he enrolled in Erwin Heerich’s painting class at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He graduated there in 1988. Besides teaching appointments at various art academies he showed work at numerous group and solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad. This year, the Kunstverein at Hanover presented one of his installations in an exhibition entitled Blast, and his one-man show at Museum Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen is on view until 12th September. Now, with Baozis & Boards, Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer presents new works conceived specially for the Gallery space.

Up to the early 1990s, Paul Schwer’s works were executed mainly as oil paintings on canvas. In titles and subjects he would draw on reality in a mimetic way, even though the ‘depicted’ element would defy a focus if a viewer should attempt it.- Therein already lay the artist’s basic pictorial ideas. Since then, his painterly procedure has evolved into an experimental laboratory that takes polyester foil or sheets of glass, cloth or acrylic glass as the support for bold brushwork-applications of either acrylic paint or pigment in a buttermilk medium. Foil sheets printed with black-and-white photographs or acting as screens for projected films or slide images are also part of his repertoire. Schwer combines the individual elements with each other and places them in different locations in the exhibition space – hanging on the wall (shelves both single and racked, frieze-like rectangles); leaning against the wall (glass and acrylic sheets standing on the ground); covering the walls, all-over-fashion; arranged as tableaux on the ground and partially over architectural floodlights, thus the installation Blast ); set up in the middle of a room (round structures stapled together out of balls of foil – the Baozis) – hanging from ceiling to floor (lengths of cloth and foil); or again, strung athwart a room (Farbverspannungen or ‘stretched colours’ of tulle). This outline sketch of orders in which his work may be seen reflects Schwer’s basic artistic drift – moving increasingly away from place, scale and function of the classical panel painting, the non-transparent rectangle hung on a wall at eye-level, and taking up the variables of the real ambient space to let it permeate the work’s reality. In concrete terms this means the choice of a transparent support material (plastic foil, glass, etc.) that does not hide what it has of before and behind and which articulates the continuity of the space. These ‘colour membranes’ simultaneously allow the Directions that the three-dimensional space offers and that embody a host of Angles of Vision to be brought to bear (horizontal, vertical, various inclines). Finally, Schwer combines his cycles of work to form complex installations that provoke the viewer to perceive anew and more intensely; and that have us experience colour ‘as an optical phenomenon’ – as coloured light, that is; not as coloured material.

If at all, it is the Boards on show in this exhibition that still distantly recall the traditional panel painting. On wooden shelves mounted at eye-level, two or three layers of acrylic sheet, painted in monochrome colour are propped upright and lit from an artificial light source. Foils with black-and-white photographs of urban and nature fragments also make up part of this staggered set. Like the film and slide projections, these photographs act as a pointer to reality, but without resorting to reproduce it in paint; instead it emerges as a collage of quotes with the function of ‘cutting’ one into the other, the exhibition space and the outside space – and to imply an anchoring, a definition of location (such as Stralsund ). An effect running counter to the loosening up of the criterion of the outward demarcation of the picture occurs in the frieze-like wood constructions with a set made of foil sheets, coloured or with a photographic motif, they, too, backlit with fluorescent light. The more compact structure and spatial depth of these works lends them something of an object quality and they appear like showcases for a film running from the spool, and create the effect of a compaction of material. With the pigment, as always, applied to be translucent, not opaque, the same principle of overlap and the blending and consolidation of colour is at work in the large-scale pieces composed of coloured glass positioned directly on the ground and leaning against the wall. When Schwer crumples and staples the painted pieces of foil together into his great Baozis what faces the beholder is matt and glossy surfaces acting as the facets of a sculpture-like heap of colour that, while appearing more corporeal than the other works, is yet weightless and delicate.

With almost scientific, penetrating method, Paul Schwer runs through the gamut of the contemporary possibilities of painting in the postmodern era. The transparent construction of his installations and their unballasted lightness imbue the colour anew with vitality, intensity and beauty.

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Paul Schwer - Baozis & Boards