Daniel Wenger

For his first solo exhibition, Daniel Wenger investigates the internal dimensions of “minor” painter Édouard Vuillard, iterating new excerpts, mutations, and territories in a form of speculative surveillance that moves inward and outward through pictorial and relational space-time. For many painters operating in today’s algorithmic visual culture, the gestalt of a painting remains a collective expression of thousands of decisions; both the mark and the gesture communicate within a network of local contingency where negative space and openings become active and crucial. Wenger’s practice builds its momentum by exploding and opening up layers of mark-making, revealing a correspondence between atomized motifs and materials — worn grounds, sharp shapes, fluid tendrils, and screen detritus. These are sifted through the matrix of a single image: Vuillard’s First Fruits (1899), a monumental landscape commissioned by the financier Adam Natanson for his Paris villa. Seizing on one passage of the painting, a hilltop in the middle ground, Wenger wends his way through Vuillard’s sawn-off forms as though they were the dystopian downtown L.A. of Blade Runner, searching for answers around the corner from what his eyes can see. Surprisingly, a comic touch, a wit is unearthed in this act of disloyal replication; what might be seen as an act of personal reclamation locates the looping systems of our own bureaucracies in a vista of bucolic idealization. The result is a knowing kind of historical return — who among us hasn’t bent a paper clip out of shape? But you may have been a child when you last did so.

—Danny Bredar