Artist Martin Wehmer who lives in Freiburg, has, in recent years developed a powerful, very individual artistic position that avails itself of a formal language at once abstract and concrete. Viewed in the context of current claims regarding the emergence of a new representational art, Wehmer's large-format paintings strike the observer as truly daring and bold in their fearless affirmation of artistic power.

His show at the Kunstverein Freiburg features two as yet incomplete workgroups produced almost at the same thime, which deal with two disparate topic areas : with the painterly concentration of shape and color, and the latters'division in and extension into space.

In Wehmer's works, surface means simulating closeness through an almost physical handling of color. But the closeness is either paralyzed in an ornamental working of differing two-dimensional segments or has an evasive quality : We are presented with a permanent interplay between stagnation and movement, closeness and distance, emotionality and logic.

Bright colors can easily create the false impression. Strong color contrasts suggest strong feelings, and seduce us into believing everything is easy, and easily consumable.

Up until a few months ago, Martin Wehmer exploited the ambivalent atmosphere this suggestion engenders. Above all, pictures created in recent years deal with the irresolvable paradox between surface and depth, between illusion and reality.

Wehmer uses his painting concepts like support structures to lend cohesion to the colors which simultaneously appear intent on negating any hint of concept. Employing a system in which colors interact with each other, he unites strong color contrasts in swerves and segments. The combination of these sections gives rise to whole surfaces that vibrate in themselves and inwards. Often opaque, and applied using an energetic movement, color often takes on a physical quality in these paintings, appears like an intrusion into space.

In these works Wehmer always favors vibrant, conspicuous, vehement, assertive colors. But what at first glance appears so vehement and charged with emotions, is in fact distinguished by a subtle detachment. Or put differently, the opaque application of paint, and the strong color contrasts evoke stereotyped images of a supposed cheerfulness and lightness, which Wehmer then proceeds to undermine by his specific choice of colors and painting technique.

His calculated, precise arrangement of diverse color climates creates distance and coldness, and serves to form a counterbalance to the cliché of a colorful handling of painting. The strong pulsating of the color tones produces spheres of activity, which in turn seem to prevent this very pulsation. This gives rise to a constant opposition between severity and openness, between surface and space.

The orchestration applied in these works relies on contrasts : The systematic method retreats behind the stereotyped effect produced by a broad color palette, and in the process dominates it completely. The resulting tense relationship induces an artistic atmosphere, which however always appears latent and never obvious.

Martin Wehmer virtually encloses his colors in segmented curves which only imply movement on account of their segmentation. Imply it because ultimately every movement, every dynamic thrust is stopped on every occasion. By using a method that employs deliberate painterly and atmospheric means to arrange opposites in contrast and concert with each other, a highly specific interaction is produced in these paintings between various formal and color situations, which in turn affect corresponding emotional states. That they affect them is an indication of Wehmer's interest in combining moments of closeness and distance, and simultaneously setting them in opposition to one another.

For his exhibition at Kunstverein Freiburg, Martin Wehmer has succeeded in developing through his paintings a new approach to the dynamic processes of a visual language, that is identical with his previous works in aesthetic and subject terms, and yet also attests to a changed interest in the relationship between space and color : The painting formats have further increased in size; the colors are dark through to black, and Wehmer only contrasts them very sharply with bright, vivid colors.

Only seldom are the extensive curves interrupted, and the lively application of paint is evident in both crude, but also accurately placed overlays. It is not without irony and humor that Wehmer places in the painterly structure smaller and larger mounds of paint like stumbling blocks, or ends lines and serves abruptly and with assurance. At the same time, the underlying painterly mood appears more profound owing to the dark colors and generous treatment of space.

While his earlier works are characterized by a dynamism that is repeatedly focused inwards notwithstanding their formal language that encompasses the entire format and extends beyond the picture frame, in his current paintings Wehmer continues the picture's statement more strongly into the two dimensional, and thus also into the three dimensional. In doing so he also moves away from the topic "color as volume", and produces painting which is a space for latent movement and action.

While his earlier works are characterized by a consciously and carefully dilemma between a confident surface and its lack of a third dimension, his current paintings appear to reverse this state of tension : the surface recedes in favor of a depth induced by atmosphere.

Martin Wehmer shows works at the Kunstverein Freiburg from different worksgroups which are closely related to each other, and precisely because of their interactive quality based on diversity, they offer a wide and stimulating spectrum of his manner of work. A large proportion of the works on show were produced for this exhibition.

Martin Wehmer does not deploy a representational formal language in the conventional sense, yet he nonetheless intensifies an oscillating process between varying experiences of reality and the objective world : His works reflect worlds of experience not at a representational but at an atmospheric and enigmatic level. Wehmer's non-representational approach to the production of dissimilar states opens up unexpected mental realms.

Dorothea Strauss
in catalogue Kunstverein Freiburg, 2002