Colourful, bold, full of relish - shimmery, reflective, and a little flashy - Markus Weggenmann's works attract attention and still, beyond the high-gloss paint, they keep their distance. They seem sealed, yet at the same time closely present. Weggenmann's work is complex, as simple it might appear at first sight.

The starting point of the lacquer works are small drafts - gouache drawings, created in great quantities, on which the primary image conception happens: the act of painting. After a first selection, some of these drafts are scanned into a computer and further edited in this digital form. This includes straightening the outlines, changing colours, or superimposing different forms. The last and possibly most crucial step occurs with the blow-up: The painting is transformed to large scale, always by an outside manufacturer, in the case of the lacquer works by a professional car varnisher. The result fascinates with its glassy appearance, but also with its industrial make, which has been entirely rid of a personal flow. Nevertheless - and this is the paradox with Weggenmann's paintings - the artist's handwriting remains clearly legible.

This handwriting is defined by distinct, moving forms, which together create lively gestures out of colours lying next to, within, and above each other. Weggenmann's palette seems to be growing constantly, displaying adventurous and suprising applications of colour. Recent works show a continuous development towards interleaving a multitude of layers more perspectively. This idea of feigned depth, which allows the viewer to "look through" the various layered "motives", evokes an almost classical impression of picture composition, hierarchically divided into fore-, middle-, and background. At the same time however, he also creates paintings which are very reduced in colour and form, occasionally even turning figurative.

But Weggenmann's forms never have an illustrative function. What the artist does is not abstract painting, but, as he puts it, "an abstraction of painting". The process towards the final work is crucial to Weggenmann, all that what happens to him and the painting through it. As one of very view painters, he doesn't aim to direct the act of painting, but lets himself be guided by it, searching for traces of the very essence of the image and the genre of painting.

Markus Weggenmann (born 1953 in Singen/Germany) lives and works in Zurich and Berlin. His work has been exhibited in numberious solo- and group shows in Europe and overseas.

Yasmin Afschar