transience…
thought or matter transforming
to attain another state
arrest the moment when it’s neither its history nor its future
unformed, deformed
or
a broken thing without determination
when the sum has unbecome
to be parts again
still informed by its antecedence but free
to connect with what surrounds it
or
remain a fragment
just enough of a structure to house the hermit crab of imagination
A thing finished is claustrophobic,
there is no more space for thought to swirl and exhale into the future.
accepting or rejecting are the only actions left.
you can extrapolate from the unfinished unguided by intentions.

there it is composing the neither/nor
to settle only
to break apart and create an unintended space or a frail composition.

just be material
acting with other material
let it flow and spill through you
as the imperfect and  leaking conductor.

(a.w., 2021)

Alexander Weiss is a visual artist who has spent much of his time researching and traveling in New York, Marseilles, Bogotá, Caracas and living in the Venezuelan rain forest for a year. Inhabiting extremely different and diverse spaces and cultural contexts to find resonance and a place where he can come to terms with the necessity of creating, using methodes and techniques of painting while simultaneously being cognizant of the historical weight that is associated with the form he is driven by and is most immersed in.

With his ever-evolving ideas, Weiss is critically engaged with concepts of nomadic subjectivity, new materialism and the abstraction of inner alienation. Even though Weiss works with constellations of different media and mediums such as collage photography and the utilization of diverse textural materials, his primary praxis involves the classical canvas and diverse techniques on painting itself.

Weiss’s most recent oeuvre explores the boundaries between subjectivity and agency, the dissolution of self-ness, potentials of inclusive relations with multiple co-actors. He is concerned with questions of mutuality, difference, marginality and materiality in order to explore alternative perspectives. Notions of materiality and coexistence are central to Weiss’s ethically and socio-politically driven practice of painting. Yet they do not border on the obvious political notions of the imagery confining itself to a rigidly codified visual narrative.

Seeking for ways to challenge the domination of his own inner Eurocentric views and culturally specific presentations of art alongside it. Alex’s interest as a traveler marked a generative potential of visuality coming from diverse perspectives and places he extensively traveled through and lived in. Weiss’s initial visit to New York in 1995 and his subsequent residence through 2010, further brought an important shift to his own practice. For he saw, first hand the breath of the contemporary New York art scene and the creative possibilities that were non-institutional yet at the same time open to serious engagement on the very creative process itself. During this period Weiss found much resonance acquiring diverse techniques and also different modalities to work with the canvas in his post-post structural modern world. In order to deepen his research and to further comprehend the contrasting perspectives that lay in front of him, Weiss immediately immersed himself in the complexities of our current ideas and is continiously engaged in pushing his process further.

at Kunstpunkt Berlin,  September 2022