Working in combined layers of line and colour, Weiser’s gestural and literal carvings cut up the painting in a built up tension between the intricate syntax of abstraction and the paintings’ physical surface. Marked by materiality, textures, burnished surfaces and a striking synthesis of addition and negation, the intensely textured paintings point to Weiser’s implicit observations of the evolution in the practice of painting.
Poised between hard-edge painting and expressionism, Weiser’s work reveals a new engagement with composition, agency and intention, confronting abstract expressionistic tropes with the use of different effects, procedures and materials. The layering strata of pigment in the paintings, complicates the distinction between areas of colour and line – creating a sense of uncertainty to the identity of each. Surfaces absorb light and reflect it unevenly, keeping the viewer mobile by optical instability and lack of figure-ground distinctions. While abstract, the works are still illusionistic, and shadows, gradations of colour, a sense of movement, variations between light and darkness, rippling waves, wood grain, and reverberating lines of contour are evoked in the undulation of palette and seismic surface criss-crossed with diagonal striations.
