"BOOK OF POEMS" - 522 W 19th Street, New York

“…a kind of beautiful damage.”

- Barry Schwabsky, on the paintings of Paul Wesenberg

SLAG&RX is pleased to present Book of Poems, Paul Wesenberg's third solo exhibition with the gallery, comprising a new body of paintings made in Berlin over the past year. The exhibition takes its title not as a literary conceit but as a description of method: each canvas is composed the way a poem is composed, through interval and omission as much as through statement, so that what is withheld becomes as legible as what is shown.

Wesenberg's paintings are built twice: first by subtraction, then by addition. He “irritates” the linen with a drill before a brush ever touches it, cutting fine channels and occasional “wounds” into the weave that adorn the surface like “graceful embroideries,” in Barry Schwabsky's phrase, a controlled excavation that leaves the surface raised where matter has in fact been removed. Only afterward does he return material to the canvas: oil worked thinly into the linen so it disappears into the fiber, oil built up in thick passages that sit above it, and, most distinctively, skins of paint dried on Plexiglas and peeled away whole, then laid onto the canvas like scar tissue grafted from elsewhere. The result is a surface that carries the memory of its own making, one is never permitted to forget that the painting is also, as Schwabsky writes, “a made thing, a construction,” its layered history of intervention and reworking held visibly within the finished surface.

Out of this stratified ground, images gather without quite arriving. A horizon asserts itself, then dissolves into weather. A stem, a wing, a roofline surfaces for a moment before folding back into pigment. Wesenberg works from the vocabulary that painting has always claimed as its own, landscape, flower, figure, dwelling, but he declines to let any of it settle into illustration. What appears is less an image of a place than the residue of having looked at one: specific enough to carry the charge of an actual observation, general enough to remain open to the viewer's own memory.

The new paintings extend this logic into a more restrained, almost crepuscular register. Fields of ash, lilac, and dove-gray are pierced by threads of drawn pigment, cobalt, pale blue, violet, that fall down the canvas like rain, roots, or unbarred musical notation. In several works a pale, unpainted disc interrupts the field: a moon, an aperture, or simply an absence the surrounding incident has learned to grow around. Toward the lower register of each canvas, that restraint gives way, matted accumulations of emerald, rose, and gold gather like undergrowth caught in a low light, dense with the incident that the upper field has held at bay. Where the earlier works in this ongoing series announced themselves with a warmer palette of umber and ember pink, this newest group is quieter, more nocturnal, closer to the hush that follows a poem's final line than to its opening statement.

Meaning, in these paintings, is a matter of accretion rather than argument. Nothing in Book of Poems illustrates or paraphrases; each canvas simply behaves as a poem behaves, allowing sense to accumulate through rhythm, recurrence, and the material fact of the paint itself. Taken together, the paintings ask to be read the way one reads verse, slowly, and more than once.

This meeting of image and word is not new to Wesenberg. Last Ray, his collaborative project with Barry Schwabsky, pairs a suite of poems by Schwabsky with an original lithograph by Wesenberg accompanying each copy of the book, work that the critic Christoph Tannert described as “a painting of sedated loudness, of halted precipitation.” The same hushed register, tuned there to Schwabsky's verse, resurfaces here in the muted tonality of Book of Poems. The opening reception will mark the launch of Last Ray, with Schwabsky reading from the book in person.

About the Artist

Paul Wesenberg (b. 1973) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He trained at the High School of Art in Minsk, Belarus, and later at the Muthesius University of Art in Kiel, Germany, receiving a DAAD award in 1995. Wesenberg has held solo exhibitions at institutions including Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Kunstverein Trier; Kunstverein Unna; Kunstverein Flensburg; Hohenloher Kunstverein; Künstlerhaus Saarbrücken; Städtische Galerie Cham; Kunstverein Speyer; and the Museo di Arte Sacra Contemporanea, Sesto al Reghena, Italy, alongside an ongoing collaboration with SLAG&RX in New York and RX&SLAG in Paris. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest; Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin; and Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin. His paintings have been the subject of critical writing including an essay by Barry Schwabsky, and have been discussed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail.

IMAGE DETAIL:

Phoenix Waters (Detail), 2026

Oil and oilskins on linen

200 x 150 cm / 79 x 59 in