Clages

The French critic, poet and artist Zacharie Astruc passionately sought to revive the traditional art of tableau. Complex history paintings with a strictly defined storytelling structure, Astrac hoped to free them from the conventions of the linear narrative, dramatic coherence and the various formal devices associated with the genre. He called for a return to the immediacy of painting, simultaneity of representation and other pre-imposed conventions that forced a successive, prescribed reading of art. To counter these inflexible, schematic narratives, the salon master emphasized a lightness of gaze and the immediate, phenomenological encounter of viewer and painting.

For his second solo exhibition at Galerie Clages, Bernhard Walter will be showing tableaus with a similar call for directness: three pictorial structures made of painted wooden beams arranged in geometric forms, slightly askew. Seen en face, the white structure just barely lifts out of the underpainting; only vaguely colored shadows make the shining white lines appear lit from behind. Just one step to the side and you see why: the slats are colored on the inside, so the tableau forms crystallize according to where the viewer is standing in relation to the object.