The most striking features of Martin Wehmer's new paintings are the intense use of color and the animated forms in them. On first impression, his art is very direct, developed entirely from a spontaneous gesture. Yet Wehmer plays with opposites. Initially, he apparently appeases the conventional wishes and demands made of painting - only to counter this with multiple violations of the same. Like a picture puzzle Martin Wehmer's paintings offer proximity and distance, surface and space, they are overpowering and yet pleasant in feel - his position constantly shifts between immediacy and artificiality, intuition and careful calculation.

But how does this interplay come about ? What gives rise to this special multi-dimensional quality so typical of his art ? This can be best be explored by discussing one of his works from 2002.

The first impression is of powerful colors, a predominance of yellow and red, whose diverse shades, bolstered with various blue tones, swirl and merge into each other as if they were each the section of new semi-circle. Layer upon layer of color, extending to form ever greater sweeping bands of color; a choreography of dancing sections of circles unravels before our eyes. Nor do they respect the boundary the frame imposes. Dissected by the edge of the picture the rotating circular fragments point to something beyond this boundary, seem to extend in never-ending duplication into infinity.

Martin Wehmer's visual forms represent painting at its purest, derived as they are directly from the paint. A circular fragment consists of various stripes of impasto paint, stripes that are not filled in with color but are executed in color. Such forms evolve directly from the medium paint. You can clearly follow the carefully applied sweep of the brush. Sometimes, the oil paint is more concentrated at the point where a band of color begins, effectively manifesting the first brush stroke, while directly adjacent traces of background are visible on the underlying canvas.

Yet Martin Wehmer reverses the direct nature of the painterly gesture in the painting. For instance, the next circular segment is worked with a great deal more vigor. Indeed, the individual bands of color seemingly merge into one another. The blurred impression this produces conveys a strong degree of illusionism. Thus the painting unites two positions : the demonstration of a pure painterly gesture, and painting which proves to be an illusion of itself.

This toying with opposites is also evident with regard to the spatial impression Wehmer strives to achieve. Initially, the painting presents a scene that is staged entirely on the surface. The oils are evidently applied impasto to the surface of the canvas. And as carefully constructed geometric shapes the circular fragments are also destined to remain surface phenomena since a circle and its radius can only be constructed on a two-dimensional surface.

Yet Wehmer's use of color also produces a very individual spatial dynamism. Luminescent yellow seems to shine out from the depth of the painting, darker tones suggest a retreating of the surface. But essentially it is the shapes and their arrangement, their cropped sectioning, their overlaps, their layers that generate a spatial structure with "mock depth" and an intense three-dimensional feel. Irritatingly, the exact nature of the spatial circumstances remains uncertain, since the sections of curves presented in color also produce the impression of permanent movement. The structure of forms and colors creates undefined spaces, whose ultimate dimension remains concealed in the painting itself.

And what impression does the painting make as a whole ? Self-contained, clearly defined by the four sides of the canvas, by virtue of the size and intensity of color used for the forms, it emerges in a dimension that competes with human proportions. The powerful, circular bands of color take up the entire frame, and are intrusive - the painting convincingly illustrates a self-contained cosmos of movement and color.

But here again it is possible to draw the opposite conclusion, because the painting simultaneously possesses a fragmentary character : both the notched circular segments and their implied motion seem to burst the picture's confines asunder. As such, the picture mutates and becomes a section of a cosmos that to all appearances extends into infinity. The painting presents what might also happen beyond the limits of the picture, apparently a fragment of an infinite painted loop of self-perpetuating forms. This being the case, the frame of reference shifts in the other direction : As part of an overwhelming macro-cosmos the painting now becomes a section of manageable proportions which appears small to us as a "pars pro toto".

This apparent paradox takes the stage as a perpetuum mobile : It produces a constant movement from within the painting outward, and draws the gaze back into its implied center, uses circles and structure to create fixed points, which it then proceeds to ignore with great virtuosity. The gaze glides over the inviting surface, is sucked in by the color and spatial dynamism, then regains control unexpectedly in the observation of a small detail.

Accordingly, the paramount feature of Martin Wehmer's current works lies in the simultaneous presentation of an apparently direct appearance and yet a carefully orchestrated whole. Every single brush stroke comes across as a spontaneous, autonomous gesture in which the paint is applied directly to the canvas. Yet nothing is actually left to chance in the generosity of the sweeping circular segments, the mass of painting material employed and the obvious perfection of execution. It emerges that the spontaneous gesture is actually a careful orchestration of the painterly action, a perfect, masterly manipulation of the medium paint.

Yet this orchestration is not limited to some calculated manipulation strategy. Rather, we are repeatedly drawn into the events of the painting, and can retrace the act of the painting, can tap the multi-dimensional quality offered in Martin Wehmer's paintings as we wish. These works are so fascinating because they reveal two dimensions which are actually in opposition to one another, and grant us the liberty to either move between the extremes or to even experience them as parallel forms of action and presentation.

Ele Keiper
in catalogue Kunstverein, Freiburg, 2002