Jara Lahme, M.A.
We perceive a brushstroke, a line that connects with others to form surfaces, stretching into networks, grids, and lattice structures across the canvas. In contrasting chromatic intensities, these structures interlock, blur, and overlap. What emerges are impasto, relief-like works whose depth and interwoven complexity of form and color evolve through the processual working method of the artist Axel Plöger.
The initial visual impression establishes the first point of contact between viewer and artwork on an emotional level of experience. At first, it is a feeling—an interest, a sense of connection, a curiosity. Through repeated viewing, ever new layers unfold. The grids, networks, and oil-based scribbles resemble mutable, organic entities that appear to shift and transform depending on light conditions, duration of observation, and spatial distance. To the visual connection is added a spatial and thus physical engagement: movement around the work brings its materiality to the fore, evoking the desire to extend one’s hand and touch the relief-like structures, to perceive them through the full range of sensory experience.
The reflections of the artist’s personal and environmentally conditioned perception, which take shape within his paintings, become accessible to the external world through the contemplation of form. Emerging from the tradition of modern geometric abstraction, abstraction may be understood as the reduction of a complex environment to its most fundamental elements: point, line, and plane. Through their compositional interrelation, the artist achieves a return to natural dichotomies, manifested in the tension between line and point, network and surface. These recurring motifs—referred to by the artist as “sounds”—are ultimately characterized by dissonance and harmony, calm and turbulence, clarity and entanglement.
Color field and form, despite their seemingly superficial opposition, remain in a constant state of tension, observable in the overlapping, contact, and layering of forms and colors. This painterly interplay of dichotomies points to the dissolution of boundaries between apparent opposites: clearly articulated lines coexist with dominant grid structures, while interlocking forms, colors, and lines enter into a nearly symbiotic relationship. Through prolonged and attentive viewing, increasingly more becomes visible. The softening of boundaries between form and color generates an intermediate space—a between—which may be understood as a visualization of internal negotiations within fluid states of being. Whether these processes relate to the artist himself or rather describe the moment of encounter between artwork and viewer remains open to individual experience.
Within the artist’s mode of expression, the selection of both coarse and fine lines assumes a central role—whether as a deliberately applied brushstroke or as a swiftly drawn line within a large grid or entangled structure. These can be understood as painterly interventions into the pictorial field and, through their recurring presence, form a motif-based contingency across the oeuvre. Accordingly, cross-references can be established within the works of recent years which, as intended by the artist, form not merely a visual network but also a dialogically interwoven network structure on the meta-level of the overall body of work.
The line, as well as the act of painting itself—the processual development and the acceptance of transformation within the image—points to the significance attributed to this seemingly reduced means of expression. In its simplicity, the line evolves into a symbolic vehicle for expressing omnipresent complexity, as already evident within the formal language of geometric abstraction. Thus, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, in developing his theory of love, observed: *“The path to the concrete requires the detour through abstraction.”*¹
The reduction of form leads to the construction of a new yet familiar abstract visual language—one that no longer requires words but, grounded in the visual perception of materiality and color, is capable of articulating the ambiguity and multiplicity of individual emotional experience. The act of viewing thus entails an intimate and individual moment of connection with the concrete painterly counterpart—one that invites reflection, evokes affect, and, in each encounter with the work, constitutes a distinct experiential event.
1. Luhmann, Niklas: Love as Passion: The Coding of Intimacy. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982 (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 1124), p. 10.