Matthias Weischer

Linking back to the classical painting tradition, in Waschraum Matthias Weischer resuscitates the interior as a theme for painting, using this most traditional of motifs as a sounding board to explore thoroughly modern concerns. Paradoxically, it is from within the strict conventions of 17^th-century Dutch painting that Weischer finds one of the most innovative and direct expressions of his own age, simultaneously mining the rich seam of the history of painting while concomitantly capturing the zeitgeist of his time. On the one hand an exercise in the purely formal concerns of Modernism, the deserted, isolated and sparsely furnished interior space of Waschraum enshrines the disenchantment of a generation whose euphoric expectations at the reunification of Germany have stagnated into disillusionment and anomie.

Originally from Westphalia in West Germany, Weischer is one of a select few who, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, swam against the migratory tide and journeyed to the comparatively impoverished Leipzig in the East in search of a very traditional artistic training as it had been taught for centuries. Inspired by Rauch and the status conferred on him by the painting department in the Leipzig Academy, Weischer resisted the lure of the new media department and, clinging to his palette, tenaciously upheld the validity of the age-old medium.

In the midst of the ostensible figurativeness of the scene, in Waschraum pure painterly gestures compel the eye to the surface, further disturbing spatial representation. In his unique creative process, Weischer builds layer upon layer of paint, allowing it to drip and splash down the canvas, adding now only to over-paint later. In places pastose, elsewhere his application is dry, often laying bare previous forays and allowing an architectural insight into the construction of the picture. Through this technique, the surface unity of the picture plane is disrupted by the materiality of the paint: scratches, splashes of paint and the sgrafitto drawing of the underlayers intrude on the uppermost surface turning figuration into abstraction. Whereas in the 17^th century the polished surface of the canvas was conceptually imagined to be a transparent screen onto a pictorial world that was imagined behind it, in Weischer's painting, by contrast, there is a disjunction between the formal and the conceptual unity of the image. It is in this balancing act between spatial illusion and the visibility of the means used to create it that Weischer's innovation and skill reside.