Matthias Esch: Slice Through Reality

Esch translates modes of thinking into visual structures. His paintings are composed of drawn systems, patterns, and schematic forms that appear calculated and controlled, yet are repeatedly interrupted: sliced, shifted, pierced, or broken open. These disruptions function as deliberate ruptures within otherwise ordered compositions, destabilizing both visual coherence and conceptual certainty.

A key underlying reference throughout the exhibition is the literary cut-up technique developed by Brion Gysin and popularized by William S. Burroughs. While never illustrated literally, this method informs Esch’s approach to image-making. Just as cut-up writing fractures syntax and meaning to reveal unexpected associations, Esch fractures visual systems to unsettle habitual ways of seeing and thinking. Language, structure, and perception are treated as unstable constructs rather than reliable tools.

His works are accompanied by openly subjective, often fragmentary titles that hint at sources, mental states, or conceptual tensions without resolving them. In this way, painting becomes a site where meaning is not fixed but continuously negotiated. Slice Through Reality presents painting as a means of cutting beneath surface structures—not to arrive at clarity, but to expose the fragility of the systems we rely on most, including language itself.