The entire body of Max Wechsler’s work seems to revolve around the confrontation between emptiness and the letter. The letter devoid of determinations, the limitless letter, considered in the mystery and radiance of its naked existence.
Speaking of writing, a 13th-century Kabbalist, Isaac the Blind, seems to describe Max Wechsler’s paintings: “Colors rise and spread over the configurations of white like light on coal.”
The technique is subtle. The glue used by the painter, spread widely to mount fragments of writing and fragments of white, is not applied beneath the paper but above it. It thus becomes an essential plastic element of the work.
Beyond its adhesive function, which legitimizes its presence, the glue creates a resinous and hard surface, slightly repellent, which, resisting the enveloping softness of the letter rolling into the white, gives the whole its strength but also its complexity.
This hard transparency encourages the emergence of immaterial colors.
Blue (white, pink) of the sky. We literally see the invisible.
In Max Wechsler’s paintings, too, at the heart of the white, blues of every shade, pinks, yellows, and even greens are born from the tension of gray letters. Because of the narrowness of the field, they are not immediately perceived, as with the sky. Perhaps it also requires time and a resolute desire to truly see what we are seeing. There is a gradual unveiling of sensation. But it is with this tensile color, the color without matter and purely qualitative, that it most clearly appears as a path.
Tyndall effect. Light diffuses through the particles of the colloidal suspension. The barely colored iridescences vary depending on the light of the moment but especially depending on whether they are seen through transparency or reflection. In any given painting, however, they are necessarily seen through both modes at all times.
But beyond these surface colors, each painting possesses a deeper, indefinable tonality that appears after prolonged observation or immediately when juxtaposed with another painting in the series. Stable under all circumstances, this tonality originates from the nature of the mounting support (linen, cotton, naturally pink plywood, or painted panel), which acts subtly, more as a radiation than as a tone.
Thus, two lights: one beyond the letter, the other beneath it. One emerges from the air, materializing in the heart of transparency; the other rises from the matter and, contained by the layering, becomes subtle as it passes through the obscurity.

—Maurice Benhamou, Excerpts from “Four Painters of Tensile Color” – Edition Espace-Abstraction, 1997.