"FOUND NEW PARADISE" - 16 Rue des Quatre Fils, Paris

For his third solo show at Galerie RX&SLAG Paris, Berlin artist Paul Wesenberg presents a new body of work entitled Found New Paradise. This exhibition follows on from Half Past Paradise, presented in 2024 at SLAG&RX in New York. These two exhibitions share a common poetic source of inspiration: Water from Another Source, a poem by Barry Schwabsky, also an influential art critic, which acts as a discreet thread running through the artist's recent work.

For P. Wesenberg, the notion of “paradise” is one of the oldest and most universal archetypes in the cultural history of humanity. It transcends eras, beliefs and civilisations, embodying in turn the promise of an afterlife, nostalgia for a golden age or the aspiration to a state of inner peace. The artist translates this collective memory of paradise into painting, in a plastic language that is both sensory and enigmatic, made up of visual fragments, luminous intuitions and superimposed materials.

Influenced by the New School of Leipzig - an artistic movement that emerged in reunified Germany in the 1990s - Paul Wesenberg belongs to a generation of artists who are freeing themselves from programmatic discourses to explore a painting that is constantly changing. Like his contemporaries, he mixes figurative and abstract elements without hierarchy, seeking a dynamic balance between the legible and the obscure, between surface and depth.

His works are constructed like territories, interior landscapes criss-crossed by visible tensions. The eye lingers on patches of sunlight, aquatic reflections, obscure foliage, sometimes on the silhouette of an animal - often a leopard - whose eyes shimmer in a green half-light. These blurred, almost spectral apparitions emerge from the pictorial material like memories, fleeting visions of an imagined elsewhere.

P. Wesenberg's painting is based on a dialectic between mastery and letting go. The gestures are broad, the layers multiple. Each canvas bears the traces of its development: scrapings, coverings, erasures.
Like an archaeologist, he excavates the surface of the canvas, revealing buried layers and unearthing forgotten forms. The energy of his work lies in this constant dialogue between concretion and dissolution. It's not a question of representing paradise, but of suggesting the sensation of it, of bringing to the surface what an ‘eternal serenity’ would be, not as a certainty, but as a possibility offered to the eye.

Found new paradise is neither a manifesto nor a utopia, but an open pictorial space, a place of perceptive experience where memory, light and imagination meet. It's a paradise that doesn't give itself away in its entirety, but lets itself be glimpsed in fragments, in the vibrant silence of a painting that thinks as much as it feels.