FLEXIBLE PICTURE SPACE

It vibrates, rotates and explodes, it radiates and emits, attracts - Martin Wehmer's art is one of resonating colors. And there are good reasons for that. The evident celebration of spontaneity an intention in his frequently impasto syle re-worked using a spatula would not be as emphatic if there were not simultaneously a passion for contrast and complementary tones, for the material and dynamic. Not forgetting his vehement engagement for a fractured composition in the picture surface that is beyond symbols and figures.

Martin Wehmer pointedly produces a world that constructs its own roof: spacy, futurological, cosmic and located somewhere between compasses and spontaneity. The coordinates of this foreign territory? They sparkle as experimental pranks that relate, indeed deal about and of painting. What is clear: This is an author who secured the expressive spectrum of painting highly intensively, absolutely ornamental, never decorative. The scene of the action in Wehmer's painting may appear neglected. After all, there is neither an object nor any allusion to the everyday. But is it really deserted? In actual fact, nothing is abandoned. But what is obvious: Anyone who creates paintings essentially includes certain things and excludes others. "In reality that (is) the creation of an art that no longer has anything to do with interpretation or the description of natural shapes ... an architecture of colors ...", was how artist Robert Delaunay discribed such a devotion to medium of painting.

Martin Wehmer applies himself intensively to an individual exploration of what painting means. In the production of presence through absence the diagnosis grows stronger in his paintings that it "(is) the color itself that through its experimentation, its breaks and contrasts forms the framework of the painting." (Robert Delaunay) This means what the paint creates as an archaeology of partially overlying color layers does not literally render it specific but patently predominantly urges it towards perception: What can be seen in and through coloration is what it is. It has presence and duration and in this radical visibility it claims without presenting itself as the illustration of a color theory historicity and meaning. "Irrespective of which civilization painting is created, irrespective of which beliefs, motifs and ways of thinking and ceremonies, ... from Lascaux through to the present day it celebrates no other mystery than its own visibility", said the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty sketching the seductive brilliance of the graphic.

Martin Wehmer's painting presents a not inconsiderable challenge to the viewer given that the incomparable color-form constellations in there here and now provide at the same time established connotations, recognizability and everyday knowledge. After all, the viewer's eye is challenged as the needle hole through which the phenomenon must go, and an experimental phenomenon at that. As a color-intensive act in the ping-pong game of harmony and chaos, shifting and transformation, moving and doubling of highly individual internal shapes and their dissolution in part or conversely substance in the process of evolution Martin Wehmer's paintings address the genuinely imaginary. Consequently, the assigning of clear meanings immediately appear to be unhinged by their opposite. This is particulary the case when you examine the abstraction that occurs in several works in the guise of simplified circular segments or stylized rotary blades.

It is primarily out of the dynamic energy and intensive color presence of the partially gestural and spontaneous seeming yet largely precise and at times impasto application of paint that Martin Wehmer's abstraction draws its strength - in other words it provokes in a purely painterly manner the similarity to the model that is called to mind. How can we describe the abstraction of Martin Wehmer? It is a very special one, committed to the logic of peinture pure between constructve art and expressive painting. Moreover, the fact that his compositions which occasionally look as if they were conceived using a ruler, triangle and compasses yet are equally dynamically formulated evoke a poetic interpretation with associations of cosmic events from a trajectory through to a field of energy can also be ascribed solely to painterly invention - even if to all appearances, graphically visible, conceptually clarified, yet in actual fact super-novas explode quite openly. This painting can most certainly not be run to ground by applying specific interpretations. The extent of irritating interventions is too great for that - both on the material and the intellectual level. As a result, the multi-dimensional imagery of Martin Wehmer presents itself as flexible.

Crossing boundaries and openness are the magic worlds that open up the amazing miracle chamber that is the actual picture space. It is situated between the two-dimensional and depth, engages in a confusing game with reality and illusion. Who produces what here - the color surface the space or the other way around is merged so smoothly as to be indistinguishable. Nothing in this highly explosive picture texture appears to stand still, everything suggests movement, explosion, vibration, division. Add to this the use of varying levels of indistinctness. At most the artist makes an experimental rendezvous with a restricting contour or a defining line. Even though elements in Martin Wehmer's paintings may appear to be precisely enclosed the sole intention is to enter into an exciting liason with the slightly tidied color region in the immediate vicinity. As such it is almost automatic that this painting which insists on penetrating boundaries should swerve off course. At any rate, in a radical imaginary production that does not give a damn about picture boundaries and tradition the explosions and rotations that radiate far beyond the picture frame into the actual space have an immense impact. It would not be hard to imagine this painting taking off.

Italian futurism pursued similar intentions when demanding "reds and deep reds that scream, the never green enough greens, the never glowing enough yellows, polenta orange, saffron-yellow, copper-yellow, all colors of speed, joy, fireworks," (Carlo Carrà) and simultaneously sought to reproduce an action on the canvas that "(will) no longer be a fixed moment of the general dynamism, it will simply be the dynamic sensation itself. - Objects in motion duplicate themselves ceaselessly, change shape by pursuing themselves like oscillations in space rushing forwards." (Umberto Boccioni) It is obvious that Martin Wehmer's paintings correspond with such a view but without citing them. Their highly visible dynamism speaks for itself.

However, wanting to position his painting here would be to overlook their representational quality, which does not employ the argument that a roaring car is "more beautiful thant the Victory of Samothrace", but takes painting as a medium seriously in its coexistence of color, light, surface, form and attraction. The turbulent activity of the picture extends out across the surface in a rejection of a classic composition based on a horizon line in which everything is subjected to the primate of producing the perspective of depth suggestive of a stage. While the traditional vanishing point is not banned from the paintings that favor a landscape format it is shifted.

By contrast, other works develop an irrestible maelstrom effect down into the depths of the picture ground. What constitutes the tension in the visibility of sunken horizons is the deliberate two-dimensional organization of segments, the brush-wide strips and also the narrower strips that finally accelerate the impression of perspective of momentum. Another aspect is that Martin Wehmer's paintings could be said to lack full-stops: In toying with tradition and resistance to it what they relate happens simultaneously. A development in time, a successive process is excluded: "... the train is a symbol for the succesive, approaching parallel lines: the identical nature of the tracks. The opposite is an art of simultaneous contrasts, of color shapes." (Robert Delaunay) And are not Martin Wehmer's paintings also determined not by line and perspective but sparkling painting and complex multi-dimensionality?

But if that is the case then in Martin Wehmer's simultaneous painting the instant has ousted the minute as the most immediate moment - for the celebration of a presence that involves metamorphosis and the ignorance of boundaries.

Claudia Posca
in catalogue Martin Wehmer 0figur
Dortmunder Kunstverein, 2007