Hiatus, Pierre Schwerzmann new solo show, offers a comprehensive overview of the development of his painting from new works in which he deals with the colourʼs strength through vertigo games, to novel propositions, his mirror-paintings.

Pierre Schwerzmannʼs pictorial work is dedicated to the dynamics, or tension, created through the close relation between what constitutes an image and the phenomenological effects that are its corollary. The effect produced through his paintings often places us in an uncomfortable position where surprise and visual destabilisation co-inhabit. It is also through this destabilisation and surprise, in these dynamic movements, that the relation to the work is being carried out.

The Hiatus project is striking for its strong position, its claimed intellectual commitment towards the sensible practice of painting. In linguistics, the hiatus defines the immediate succession of two voiced vowels belonging to two different syllables or words. Although its use in literature, and even more in poetry, has varied according to the historical period, it has seldom been used in painting.

Schwerzmannʼs paintings are nevertheless striking when we remember the Latin meaning of the term, a wide opening. Here lies the main preoccupation of the painter, a particular attention to the passage from the eye to the space of the painting. The hiatus then becomes as much the means as the form of an analysis of the sensible on the canvas. Each work, may it be on canvas or a mural painting, strives to highlight the invisible in the world, an element both fundamental and constitutive of our human system of thinking. No one can understand the world without using all their superior cognitive functions: perception, reasoning and main language. Schwerzmannʼs paintings trigger in turn a debate and a discussion.

Text by Marco Costantini