I, too, unite the light-shadow pyramids, stapling their edges with colored and colorful surfaces of the retina, and already I see a circle.

(Oswald Egger, Nichts, das ist. Gedichte, Frankfurt am Main, 2001)

In an age in which painting is offen concealed in other media (photography, room installations, video), Martin Wehmer's approach to painting appears unrestrainedly present, even demonstrative, a pointed statement for the material in painting. It is different from the otherwise abstract, conceptual painting of the day in that it is sensual and physical. Strong colors are desired for their material presence and not just for their presence as ornamentation. The gesture with which the color is positioned is far-reaching. For the most part, the pictures achieve their definition by way of a primary color to which all other tones as well as contrasts and complementary colors are subordinate. Nevertheless, Martin Wehmer's painting should not just be understood in terms of the "symptomatic visual quality of the colors."(1) The formal factors in terms of composition occupy a space which goes beyond the actual format. In fact the picture format is by no means a border to be respected, as the color gesture mostly originates outside the canvas at a point which does not belong within the actual picture format. And thus the painting reaches beyond its pure presence to an imaginary pictorial space which knows no material bounds. The essence as well as the secret of Martin Wehmer's painting is innate in this imaginary space which elevates itself above what is present.

Needless to say, it is tempting to approach this essence and the secret in Martin Wehmer's oeuvre through the presence of colors. At first, everything seems to focus around this presence : the radiating energy of pigments in the oil paint which is thickly applied by spatula, a knife and brush and which gains texture of its own through the complex process of layering, brushing und molding. Color is applied mostly in brush-width strokes which are then traced by knife or grooved with a brush. The relief results from a tectonic-like process which includes applying layers of color and accentuating and molding the material in the colored brush lines. The coloration itself emphasizes opulence : Martin Wehmer's predilection for strong color tones - yellow, orange, pink, blue, petrol - is closely related to the generous gesture with which he brings form to color. The intention of offering the color as effective a field as possible in which to respond requires a strident scale and the striking effect of the color is then the real agenda. But the impasto application of color is a statement which refers to more than just the material of painting.

The question of spatial dimension becomes all the more evident in that the textured surface also stands out as an equally strong element in his works. It reaches beyond the aspect of mere formal composition. This can be seen above all at the edges of the applied paint, and they claim much attention in this painting. Here, you can see that the catching nature of the color and the impasto nature of the material is just a pretext : In places it is warped, the flow of the paint congested, blocked, frazzled or concentrated in mounds. In these places the paint may have been lifted again by spatula or spread outward knives reach below the layer of color and separate them from the canvas to reduce the impression of compactness. Martin Wehmer calls it making colors fly.

On the edges of the strips of color the grounding and the canvas are visible and in these places the paint references its own invisibility. The old question crops up as to the status of painting in which, since Modernism, the medium connects with the fiction of its source : that there is an essential reason in the painting and this reason is the surface. A surface which refers to what the painter wishes to project onto it. A black square on a white background for example. The intention of penetrating the pictorial medium or at least of seeing the reverse always existed. In his "Unknown Masterpiece" the writer Balzac has the painter Frenhofer lift layer after layer off Titian's paintings to study his painterly technique. In Martin Wehmer's painting it is not the lifting of the layers but the appearance of disturbances in the picture space and at the edges of the color which trace a step into the secret of his painting. And now let us turn to the organization of forms in the picture space which direct the gaze from one area to another and also steer us to those irritations which show something of that which is not directly visible in Martin Wehmer's painting.

In Martin Wehmer's pictures it is the color which expands into the picture space and for this reason stripes reign in most of his pictures. On first glance the picture elements are unpretentious : horizontal and vertical stripes, circles in concentric groupings, segments of circles. In earlier pictures vertical arrangement was more or less the dominant principle of composition. The bands turned around in the painting much like the lines in a poem. They taper or flowed apart in order to weave a kind of curtain, a piece of heavy fabric with stiff folds. The movement back and forth runs in more and more conical forms and finaly creates interest for the diagonal. The diagonal divides a form in a very peculiar way. It aims at the angles of the picture format, at the corners, in order to step outside the rectangular. It thus leads into the space outside the actual picture. This dynamic force of the diagonal in Martin Wehmer's pictures has led to geometric compatibility being broken up so that it can be newly ordered outside the actual format.

Wehmer sets points along this line, outside the picture which he respectively uses as centers for circles and circular movements within the picture format. The shape of the circle is created with a point and the length of the radius. Martin Wehmer manly uses circles for his picture composition whose centers lie outside the picture format. In this way he allows forms and movements to swing into the picture distracting attention from the weight and potency of the material. The circle is an imaginary construction principle which controls the movement of the circular tracks and thus the composition.

What catches the eye in Martin Wehmer's new pictures is that the circle is almost never seen in its entirety but rather as an arrangement of circular tracks and in the overlapping of circular segments. They are arranged according to an imaginary plan on the pictorial surface, pushing into the picture format from all edges.

The gesture of applying the paint and the expressive impact of the painting's materials is limited and controlled through the radical segmentation of the preferred formal element, the circle - even through sprinkles and splashes sometimes reach into the adjoining fields. This gesture, as previously, continues to aim at an expressiveness in painting, but paradoxically, it ends up in a calculation of the gesture.

Such an irritated gesture exposes another methodology of expressive painting. It is an expression which constantly confront its borders, the edges of applied color. In pictures from the late 1990s, the stripes hang vertically into the picture from top to bottom like a curtain in order to prompt new forms at its seam. In Martin Wehmer's new works, the stimulus behind the formal elements for the composition can be largely ascribed to the circle. The effect on the picture space is all the more potent because the extensions from the circles centers which lie outside the picture format constantly cross over and disturb one another. Especially on the ends of the free-flowing painterly movements the crashing together with other composition elements within the circle is even more penetrating.

Following a phase of intense confrontation within the composition, the present extremely wide formats allow the pictures to be organized in a less compact way. Consequently, the circle now tends more towards the elliptical, a form which for its part suggests two focal points from which it is constructed. Due to the large size of he ellipse, its curved forms approximate a horizontal again.

The pictorial levels in the compositional space become ambiguous in this way as regards the question of the possible perspective of the picture, too. Several compositional centers are created in the picture, several directions as well, triggering unease in the pictorial space. But at the same time, monochrome zones of openness and transition are left that generate an energy of their own.

Thus the curved stripes and bands are not to be understood merely as geometrical / ornamental organization but rather as poles in a field - even if it is geometrically arranged. The relative strengths of color and form, materialness in the space opened up through painting. The multi-polarity creates an additional; energy which leaves the vertical and horizontal of earlier picutres far behind. These paintings verge on the polyvalent as nothing is oriented toward a clearly centralized picture space any more.

The resulting imbalance is heightened by the colors and color contrasts, for example through warm tones such as yellow and red with their tendencies into brown, orange, magenta and green. Blue makes a concentrated appearance to decelerate the movement in the picture or to energize it anew. In Martin Wehmer's current, horizontal format paintings the tendency towards non-color black, is striking even through he only approaches black, and suggests the radical nature of the color with say a deep, dark blue, brown or gray. He is aiming at the metaphysics of the dark, which is contrasted with the iridescence of white.

Thus he uses a variety of methods to reach into an imaginary picture space which knows no material boundaries. The circle as the determining form and the cold dark tones prepare this terrain which still belong to the field of abstraction. To already describe the abstraction as just imaginary or as the vision of an new space - as abstraction at the beginning of the 20th Century was able to do - does not reach far enough. Because in these pictures, apart from the theoretical space, only presence counts.

However, it is that conceptual space outside the actual picture which furnishes the sensual presence of Martin Wehmer's paintings with an intellectual thrust and bonds their physicality with reflexivity. The essence of these pictures lies in the separation between the real, visible surface of the painting and the pictorial aspect which reaches way beyond. The grooves along the edges of the color are the indentations into the invisible, into the secret.

Sibylle Omlin
in catalogue Kunstverien, Freiburg

(1) I have borrowed the term "symptomatic visuality" from the essay on "A delightful White" by Georges Didi-Hubermann in the volume "Phasmes" (DuMont Verlag, Cologne 2001, p. 101)