April 2024 by Alexander Wertheim: at Main Room
The exhibition “April 2024” by Alexander Wertheim (Germany, 1995) stems from a visit of several months to Mexico City over the course of this year, a period in which the artist made use of a provisional studio where he produced the paintings that make up the solo show installed in the main space of the Saenger Gallery. Prior to this presentation, Wertheim made his debut in Mexico at the beginning of 2024 in collaboration with the Saenger Gallery at the Acme No. 11 art fair, and in the group show “Janitz, Shinagawa, Wertheim”, presented in the city of Guadalajara in collaboration with Tiro al Blanco gallery. In both events, Wertheim exhibited paintings executed in spray paint over primed white canvases to form his characteristic grids of horizontal and vertical lines, which grapple with the relationship between space and time through their physical qualities of density (and its counterpart, lightness), width, structure, speed, color, and tone (in both the visual and auditory sense), as well as through their pictorial qualities of sequence, rhythm, and duration.
On this occasion, however, Wertheim is reflecting upon his past work and has changed his way of working, choosing in this exhibition to “drop the idea of crossing lines and instead divide my work into verticals and horizontals, allowing each gesture to remain independent of each other. My new paintings are ‘striped’; they can be seen as compositions or be used as backgrounds.”
Through this decision, the artist achieves a synthesis, turning towards the essential elements of his pictorial vocabulary: “My paintings display the transition from gesture to pattern, illustrating the inherent struggle between the elements and structures that make them up. In their parallel relations, the components oscillate between fusion and fission. Sprayed over the canvas, they embody a state between solidity and lightness.” The pictorial work of Alexander Wertheim is an on-going essay about the potential of the physical trace, a study of its factual and spontaneous condition.
— Christian Barragán
