Paul Schwer: Von beiden Enden

No beauty without danger

Paul Schwer (*1951) intervenes with aplomb in existing architecture or landscapes through his sculptural and painterly works. His repertoire of forms and materials has always focussed on autonomous sculpture, as this is where cultural and social conditions are most succinctly reflected. It all began in the late 1980s in painting with figurative motifs whose materiality seemed to dissolve through blurred colour constellations. Then, in the 1990s, the artist was forced into space, his paintings left the wall, and in the pattern he developed, spiralling like DNA, colour and light interlocked with space and movement. This resulted in works that appear raw, brittle, as if tinkered with, but are also auratically luminous and simply beautiful. Stephan Berg (Kunstmuseum Bonn) recognised in them a mixture of poetic buoyancy and softness that moves back and forth between the poles of (constructed) statics and (contingent) dynamics. Or as Johann Hartle (Amsterdam) said, quoting a song title by Einstürzende Neubauten: "No beauty without danger." For Hartle, Paul Schwer's work brings these two concepts together in a spatial symbolism that promotes the spontaneity of political expression as well as the appropriation of one's own body. Hartle quotes a bon mot from Sartre: The artist is like a dog without a cerebellum that has lost all security, all attachment and all certainty. With his heroic, self-extinguishing idea of artistic authorship in the moment of dangerous beauty, Paul Schwer confirms this characterisation of the artist with an adventurous heart!

Exhibitions:
Museum Ratingen, 29/6 - 30/9/2018
Museum Goch, 1/7 - 9/9/2018