Alexandre Wagner: Aurora

Kutlesa is pleased to present Aurora, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Alexandre Wagner, on view at the gallery’s location. This is the São Paulo–based artist’s European solo debut.

Alexandre Wagner’s paintings share a common thematic catalyst: the creation of a space resembling a landscape. Brush strokes evoke an undulating motion that suggest horizon lines, cliffs, rivers, and forests, rendered in palettes of earth tones and vibrating, electrifying greens and blues. When viewing in series, one after another, the pictorial field develops a rhythm, repeating like a mantra, in which the figurative elements gradually disappear, and the true focus of the paintings emerges: color, movement, and light.

The result is a simple and universal organization of the landscape: an almost abstract, archaic, primitive organization, without defined time and place - a space that, on the other hand, could encompass all times and places, void of any trace of human presence. Engulfed by a mist, a disorientation caused by the non-literality of the spaces, they retain the indefiniteness of a dream.

Reduced to this primary idea, the landscape serves as a motif for paintings that address, above all, issues related to the history of painting itself. Decidedly pictorial, these works materialize into images for a brief moment; upon subsequent viewings, these same images are overshadowed by the painting’s substance: material, technique, application, gesture. The vigorous brushstrokes, which almost sink into the canvas, remove more paint than they deposit on the surface, transforming into a continuous movement of scraping and excavation that contrasts with the delicate layers of highly diluted, almost liquid paint.

At the core of these works is the desire to remain on the threshold between abstraction and figuration, to inhabit an area where doubt is more important than certainty, a tension and experience perhaps only possible due to the paradoxes under which the paintings are constructed.