PAUL CZERLITZKI - layup

With Layup, Paul Czerlitzki inaugurates the first exhibition in the new spaces of Salon Kennedy on the First Floor. Here, the architecture is not merely a backdrop but an active component of the work itself. Rather than presenting a conventional canvas painting, the artist responds to the spatial conditions, using the building’s vertical light shaft as the starting point for his painterly intervention—an approach reminiscent of site-specific strategies, yet without negating the painterly gesture.

Czerlitzki works in image series, which he refers to as Bildkörper (image bodies). This term denotes an expanding, organically growing volume that continually extends in all directions while simultaneously maintaining its integrity and self-referentiality. His work is not primarily concerned with the distribution of color across a pictorial surface but rather with transforming painting into a process that oscillates between technical execution and chance. The Bildkörper remains in constant dialogue with its physical materiality and with the question of how the material itself articulates its own presence.

The wall painting in Layup is an expression of this approach. Here, Czerlitzki sprays paint through a fabric canvas onto the wall, with the canvas functioning as a stencil—yet the process of creation remains concealed. The painting emerges not only through the act of spraying but through the interplay of imprint, materiality, and chance—a moment in which the pigment detaches from the wall and is absorbed into the fabric’s structure. This dynamic movement of material can be understood as an optical pull into depth, only to reveal itself in the next instant as a flat surface structure. Process becomes the content of the work.

In parallel, existing paintings from the Anna (later pigment) series are introduced into the space. Created by dusting canvases with black pigment, these works—referred to as pigment paintings—possess an inherently fragile surface that reacts to the physical presence of the viewer. The unsealed acrylic pigment particles leave traces, unwittingly making the visitor a co-author of the work. The movement and perception of the observer are inscribed onto the canvas’s surface, generating an intense dialogue between artwork and viewer.

The ten framed works from the Relay series, presented here for the first time, are the result of a process in which Czerlitzki reworked ten preexisting pigment paintings. These works, already bearing a layered history—developed in the studio, exhibited, and marked by the traces of their travels—were placed on the floor in front of his wall painting. As pigment dust from the wall painting settled onto them, they became an active site of painterly intervention. Through deliberate gestures, layers of paint, acts of covering and revealing, Czerlitzki transformed them into new works, negotiating the relationship between accumulation and erasure, history and process.

While the Pigment series remains unframed and unsealed, leaving the works in a state of perpetual openness that continues to interrogate questions of authorship and completion—when is a work truly finished? Is the artist also a collector of his own practice?—the Relay works do precisely the opposite. By reworking and layering over the conceptual foundation of Anna/Pigment paintings, Czerlitzki interrupts its processual fluidity, fixing the works at a defined moment. Through framing and preservation, he marks their final state, transforming them from evolving material into a definitive conclusion. In doing so, Relay navigates the tension between process and decision, between site-specificity and painterly autonomy.

Layup marks a threshold—between architecture and image, between control and chance, between past works and new interventions. Within the new spaces of Salon Kennedy, this moment of transformation finds both a spatial and conceptual counterpart, granting Czerlitzki’s experiment an additional dimension.

all images © Wolfgang Stahr