Painting generates profit. Color, canvas and other vocabulary in the alphabet of painting coagulate by artistic commitment to a new word–a value–that was not there before. This can be a panel painting or a sign on the wall. The benefit can be a sale to collectors–preferred to museums–but also in exchange, in recognition of the artworks and the experiences made with them.
This is inevitably balanced by sacrifices: of invested time, wasted effort, of control. Both analytically and strategically, Paul Czerlitzki explores the side of loss. In active observation, he remains where painting presents itself as a panopticon of isolated elements, from pigment to painterly gesture, from the elapsing time of administration, production and reception to the spatial influence that the studio or the exhibition can exert on his works. From here, the generation of profit margins is easier, even if the sparse gain is a trace.
Traces are characteristic of all the works presented in this exhibition, in the Untitled series of paint sprayed through open-pored canvases onto canvases underneath. By contrast, the RELAY series takes up excess pigments from earlier works, absorbed by the spray mist, and overlays them with a new color tone. Random sediments become the primer, baroque ornamentation becomes a veiled structure. Czerlitzki has long choreographed his paintings through time according to strict rules, so that each series conceals its predecessors and the history of each work is both factually and concretely beyond its reach.
Each series multiplies the lost. In this respect, the exhibition is to be understood as a conclusion, in that its own economy is not only gradually, but self-confidently and offensively turned against itself, in the sense of a model. Disorder is becoming the principle. Czerlitzki perforates his practice into the exhibition space, from wall to picture to wall. The new Untitled canvases are split, two halves of a standard canvas lie as a filter on another, whose frame can correspond to a wall or a doorway. As soon as you enter the exhibition, an exterior appears: a drywall installation and its supporting aluminium structure.
Despite all the subcutaneous melancholy, Czerlitzki's idea of painting is less to be understood as “mourning”, which, starting with Marcel Duchamp, was to determine the debates on the relevance of painting throughout the 20th century. It is rooted in the present, whose exhausted imperatives of progress and growth it reflects with a basic idea of progressive loss. Constantly revolving around the possibility of self-dissolution, each work represents a black hole in Czerlitzki's expansive universe that competes with others.
– Martin Germann
