Bernhard Walter | Out of Alignment
26 Feb - 10 Apr 2010
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.
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.