Artist: Max Wechsler

NISO presents the work of Max Wechsler (1925-2020) for the first time in the UK with a solo exhibition, Poetics of Subtraction.

The work of Max Wechsler (Berlin, 1925 – Paris, 2020) rests on a fascinating paradox: to disappear in order to appear. His life traces the rhythm of this paradox. A Jewish child in interwar Berlin, he was sent alone to Paris in early 1939, after Kristallnacht. In France, survival carried its own silent fracture: his mother tongue —erased, buried, unpronounceable for years— was reduced to silence, while the new language remained foreign, almost inaudible. This confusion, this loss of meaning, would later become the matrix of his art. From that privation emerged not a rhetoric of trauma, but a poetics of subtraction: removing, veiling, eroding, until what remains —the essential— breathes on its own.

Wechsler began painting in the 1950s; but it was in the 1980s, after a deliberate break with the brush, that he found his true ground: working with printed materials —pages from newspapers, manuals, and other documents— which he photocopied repeatedly, cut into fragments, and collaged onto canvas, wood, or cardboard. In his hands, text ceased to function as language and became raw material. Letters abandoned their role as messengers and gained physical weight: they became grain, rhythm, pulse. The glue, brushed over the fragments rather than underneath, acted like a membrane mediating their encounter with light: unifying, stretching, and revealing tensions of colour without pigment — vibrations born of kraft paper, wood, and the changing incidence of light. On the surface, legibility dissolves; what endures is the presence of the letter as energy.

His method is not decorative but archaeological. Photocopies of photocopies, enlargements, blurs, cuts, overlays, pulses of black and white: the source text —newspapers, manuals, inventories, scores— becomes unrecognisable, yet a trace of its material memory lingers. Wechsler does not erase to conceal; he erases to reveal, stripping away the superfluous until only the structure that resists remains. His works do not narrate; they hold.

The exhibition at NISO explores this terrain through a deliberate play of scale and density:

A large work (200 × 166 cm), the darkest of all, anchors the space. Its black is not flat but alive, layered; traces of signs emerge and withdraw like memories that never fully settle. Looking at it requires time: the light seems to rise from within the darkness rather than falling upon it.

In the medium-format works (139 × 105 cm; 73 × 54 cm; 61 × 50 cm), the pulse loosens. Layers reveal fissures, bands, columns, or faintly suggested motifs — not figures, not stories, but arrangements that organise the air. Here, pulverised letters turn into texture, and texture becomes breath. The eye moves constantly between surface and depth, between presence and retreat.

The small-format works (27 × 23 cm) invite intimacy. Fragments that could rest in a hand yet contain the same immensity: irregular edges, rhythms of whites and greys, silences that refuse to fall silent. They are pages of a lost language that still vibrates.

Everything in Wechsler’s practice happens on a threshold: between legible and illegible, between what is said and what is unsayable, between the support and the light. The works evoke palimpsests: erased layers that never quite vanish, suspended, sustaining the visible from their invisibility. That invisibility is not emptiness but structure. And it is also biography: the mother tongue silenced in childhood returns not as language, but as material rhythm — truncated letters, displaced signs, memory transformed into visual respiration.

NISO finds in this work a profound affinity: structure over spectacle, duration over impact, attention over noise. Wechsler’s pieces do not demand the gaze; they shape it. They require slowness, patience — a willingness to stay until what seemed mute begins to resonate. They do not occupy space; they open it.

There is also a curatorial echo: each compact module on wood or cardboard acts as a container for a larger whole. These are not mere paintings but constellations folded in on themselves. Before them, one does not imagine the infinite sprawl of a mural, but rather the intensity of a portable archive: a condensed world that, once unfolded, reorganises memory. This exhibition makes that principle visible: the large dark field concentrates; the medium works articulate; the smallest guard. Everything fits, everything circulates, everything recomposes itself before the eye.

In an age of visual saturation, Poetics of Subtraction proposes another economy: not to add signs, but to let those that remain breathe; not to explain, but to allow appearance; not to impose meaning, but to hold its possibility. For those who linger close, silence reveals itself as matter. Light does more than illuminate; it beats. And beyond discourse, what endures — in the work and in us — is precisely this: a presence that cannot be possessed, yet cannot be dismissed.

Perhaps it is this presence — without dogma, without altar, without ritual — that brings Wechsler close to other travellers of the essential. Formal distance becomes irrelevant: the suspended calligraphy of Cy Twombly, the breathed silences of Agnes Martin, the material turned prayer in Antoni Tàpies, the visionary alphabets of Henri Michaux — all seem, at their core, to touch the same terrain. A place where form does not persuade but persists; where light writes without ink; where matter guards, without sealing, a secret left unnamed. A place where, as in these works, the visible is only the skin of something that never stops beating.