“(...) When I was a student, the idea of a “point zero” in painting fascinated me. It gave a “reason” for my thinking. What I needed – and probably what I was looking for – was a way to get into painting. Once I found my own justification and style, I quickly moved on to other issues. I walked away from expression and in doing so I was able to focus on form. This is the most interesting problem in painting today. (…)”
Roland Quetsch – Interview with Joe Fyfe, Roland Quetsch, 2018
A new approach to painting, a new beginning, a “point zero” for a new form of experimentation, may be what motivated Roland Quetsch to embark on painting.
In addition to his fascination with contemporary American painters – notably Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly – Roland Quetsch thinks of his painting in terms of shapes and colours, notions essential to his work dictated by these peers.
Often linked to concepts emerging from architecture and photography, Roland Quetsch sees painting as a legitimate approach to adopt to reference the real and artistic world while conceptualising it with the aim of creating works open to interpretation.
Observing the contemporary buildings of cities like New York or the great Icelandic spaces; through the harmonisation of colours and levelling of territories, Roland Quetsch rediscovers a palette of colours that he reinterprets in the sequencing of his painting. These strata of colours that he develops in his compositions offer a form of visual gymnastics to the eye of the spectator.
His ‘fragmentations’, as he likes to call them, an expansion of the notion of pixilation, disrupt the sight of these flat areas that the artist uses to varnish with precision and meticulousness. This rhythmic jerkiness intensifies the undulations of the canvas, sometimes revealing the preamble of a long-term creation.
Even though these works, impressive in terms of format and their technique, are significant in weight, the precision of the finish – without erasures, without scratches, in short without imperfections – adds a sensation of lightness to this demanding painting.
Thinking through sketches, seen as models by some, arriving at what we might call a “construction kit” before a setting into production that is intense physically as well as temporally, Roland Quetsch, builds his work alongside the debate that accompanies it by pushing the limits of a formal painting.
The Ceysson & Bénétière gallery is pleased to offer recent works by the artist for this new exhibition. Breaking free of the shackles of traditional painting that seeks a painting mounted on a regular frame, and beyond the so-called classical presentations that we might find in the painting of Roland Quetsch, the latter offers a varied exhibition focusing on other questions of presentation.
With superposition, the assumed and claimed visibility of the chassis, the destruction, the finish of his painting, Roland Quetsch will once again throw us off balance with the presentation of works of very large format thought through in disassembled, badly treated sequences, united and then deployed.
Maëlle Ebelle
