Works

The urban scenes which Moser paints during his stay in Morocco (1934 – 1939) forestall both the themes and the treatment of space in his later cityscapes: the aggregation of architectural elements, diagonal urban canyons tearing up spaces, labyrinthic views, shifts from views from atop to view from aside. The quarries, the cross-cut volumes and the matter transfigured by light all originate in this period.

In Italy, his study of the complex architectural organisation of the Siena cathedral is a key experience for the young artist, triggering his obsessive exploration of space.

During the Second World War, Moser probes the German expressionists and creates a cycle of wood carvings and canvases showing his consternation about the war.

Immediately after the war, Wilfried Moser moves to Paris, where the stimulating post-war climate inspires him to develop an urban iconography which will last into his late work. His new motives, figurative and seemingly naive, bear witness to the influence of Rouault, Utrillo and Ensor. In his “Jardin des Plantes”, “butcher shops”, “open houses” and “métros”, impressions and representations are transformed into poetic metaphors, where scenic arrangements call up the drama of human existence.

Between 1945 and 1948, the poetic figuration and narrative style give way to a kind of abstraction which the art critic Charles Estienne will later identify as “tachism”, a tendency within the gestural abstraction of the Second School of Paris.

This transition is most visible in the “open houses”. While it has often been noted that Moser belonged to the “tachist” movement, it has never been described how he came to join. The Bern exhibition undertakes to reconstruct this development for the first time ever. To illuminate this process, it shows several paintings of an experimental nature alongside more accomplished key works.

The architecture of the open houses is reduced to an abstract grid. Step by step, the personae and objects disappear under the painted surface. In this way, the windows and other open planes become the arena of the “acte de peindre”, and the anecdotal disappears behind the reality of painting itself. The abstract structures remain linked to the spatial dimension and to the expression of an interior frame of mind.

In the course of the 50s, Moser becomes one of the most important figureheads of gestural abstraction in post-war Paris. He is supported by important art critics and participates in a large number of group exhibitions across Europe. His personal handwriting consists of a dynamic painting knife stroke that enables him to combine the spontaneity of the “acte de peindre” with the creation of spatial constructions. In the abstract interlacement one perceives elements of cathedrals, structures of marble quarries, walls… Towards the end of the 50s the rhythms gathers momentum and the painting becomes more expressive. Figurative elements appear in shifting torrents of colour.

For about ten years, Moser’s “tachist” compositions place him in the vicinity of the Second School of Paris.

In the early 60s, Moser returns to the urban themes of his first Parisian paintings. The open houses turn into concierges, the butchers’ shops become Eurylochos, and the métros change into “metroscapes”. They are impregnated by the driven and dynamic atmosphere of metropolitan environments for which Moser sought and found a pictorial correspondence in his expressive gestural handwriting.

With his “metroscapes”, Moser creates a new picturesque representation of the subterranean metropolitan environment. In the maelstrom of the “metroscape” the massed crowd becomes a dynamic body. Grotesquely disfigured personae, fascinated and forlorn, drift through scenes of fragments of advertisements, where they are confronted with the promises of urban mythologies.

His paintings of everyday scenes, the introduction of collage elements and the use of assemblages (e.g. his epoxy sculptures) bring Moser into the vicinity of the Nouveaux Réalistes. On the other hand, the mythologisation of everyday life and his expressive brush strokes set him apart from this Parisian avant-garde trend of the time. Today, it appears that they rather make him a predecessor of a style of expressive figurative painting that emerged in Germany during the late 60s, with Georg Baselitz as its figurehead.

Assemblages, stroll able sculptures

In parallel to introducing elements of collage into his paintings on canvas, Moser creates assemblages of painted wooden planks that are scattered with shreds of advertisements. To the extent that they show the artist’s urge to transcend the flat surface of the canvas they anticipate the painted sculptures which will engage the artist’s attention from 1961 to 1990.
Although towards the end of the 60s the striated red and white epoxy sculptures have become a hallmark of the artist, their innovative contribution has not yet been fully appreciated by art historians. The Bern exhibition will put particular emphasis on this period of creation. It is not by giving form to matter that Moser breaks new ground for sculptural expression, but by extending the painted surface into the third dimension. Easy to form and easy to paint materials which were originally used in the aviation industry (epoxy) enable the artist to shape what he calls his three-dimensional paintings.

Moser’s colourful plastic sculptures are quixotic structures, mixing architectural and organic elements where the spatial experiences of metropolitan cityscapes merge and challenge each other’s contradictions in ways that make the experience of losing and retrieving one’s way in labyrinthic spatial arrangements tangible. Archetypical architectural elements – towers, domes, protective barriers – from which emblems of the consumerist world burst dramatically into view are slipped into the body of the big city. Some of his scale models are effectively executed to become walk-in sculptures in public spaces in France and Switzerland.

The pictures of rocks and stones which Moser first exhibits in 1977 represent the most spectacular departure of his career towards an entirely new stage of his work. His return to painting in a near-monochrome scale of greys and a sublimated brush stroke are observed with scepticism by the art world. It is only today that Moser’s quarries and piles of rock can be seen as forerunners of a new figurative approach to painting, culminating later in the New Leipzig School.

The quarries and heaps of rock in barren landscapes are diametrically opposed to the turbulent and colourful world of the great metropolises. However, the sculptural expressivity of these pictorial sculptures of stones, in conjunction with the way they treat space, shows that they prolong the work on plastic sculptures and represent the next stage in the development of an oeuvre which is driven by a leitmotival urge to appropriate space. In his rocky landscapes he finds new ways of creating expressive space on the canvas. As a concrete symbol of demolition and construction, of removing and shaping, the quarry becomes the theatre of the creative process.

The pictures of rock that he creates around 1983 announce his late work: the expressive tri-coloured painting-knife stroke, once the hallmark of the brushwork he developed in the 50s, is now isolated and becomes a sign in its own right, casting a light on the fragments of rock, not unlike a road sign that is both realistic and symbolic.

The modernity of Moser’s painting is no less visible in the brushwoods which emerge simultaneously with the rocky landscapes. In contemporary photography and painting one observes an interest in fragments of nature such as leaves of grass, brushwood and trees, reflecting artistic preoccupations which are very close to Moser’s in the 80s.

The brushwood motif launches Moser’s conquest of space through drawing. While drawing is part of all periods in the artist’s oeuvre, the brushwood pictures raise it to a level where drawing seems to be the very subject of Moser’s painting. The colourful maze of lines gives shape to densely entangled vistas forming a spatial labyrinth which extends into all directions, creating an inscrutable, mysteriously radiating meshwork of spaces which are reminiscent of the vaults of medieval cathedrals, Piranesi’s “Carceri” or the breezy castles of Vieira da Silva. But these pictorial developments are also linked to contemporary endeavours such as those of Brice Marden.

The isolated tri-coloured stroke of the painting-knife is the prelude to Moser’s late work. In the wake of the entangled brushwood of the drawings, the rhythmic flow of the ever longer tri-coloured dash acquires a life of its own, striking expressive chords of colours that vibrate like lines of aggressive handwriting. The dynamic rhythmic flow encrypts flowery and insect-like motifs which evoke fragmented memories of landscape painting. The dichotomic architecture of these pictures, entitled “Tree with black flowers” or “Montagne Hou”, call up images of battle arrays. In a sucking circular movement, a cold light holds sway between the two opposing arcs of tension, adding a new dimension to the unchanging foundation of Moser’s work, namely the confrontation with space.

In the early 90s, Moser revisits his earlier motifs – métro, open houses, butcher’s shops. However, he now superimposes several strata of these motifs, creating a complex densification of his universe. His late oeuvre expands in two opposing directions: at one end, a nervous brush stroke and a cold nightmarish light combine to make the metro scenes reverberate apocalyptically; at the other end, groups of comedians march in processions and retinues whose bright colours and ecstatic movements create an impression of grotesque hilarity. This line of work culminates in the large pastels of the 90s.