…here, reproduction is not reproductive: Max Wechsler seeks to generate what does not yet exist. The use of photocopying is a re-capturing that exalts pallor, gaps, blurs, ink smudges, and surfaces, creating “a new thrill.” Shifts, displacements, successive enlargements, or other transformations of form constitute, by essence, the very mode of all creation. One only creates on what has already been created. What the artist achieves in the final photocopy bears neither resemblance nor analogy to the original. It is as a copy, with the characteristics of a copy, that it becomes an original. In truth, a copy of nothing. Pure new and independent presence. Pure difference. An aesthetic of the copy. Erratic letters, sometimes as if deformed by a colloidal medium, appear through the openings the painter carves into the opacity of the world. A sort of genetic code coextensive with the universe, its double whose unfolding and legibility—if not intelligibility—constitute the world itself. The fragments the painter brings to light represent its abstraction, and what they reveal is the hidden sensitivity of a reality that presents itself with such harshness. A world to live in, not to read. But to live in henceforth with the sensitivity and meticulousness that the work teaches us.

“Untitled, 1” and “Untitled, 2” – Twenty-six Poems Twenty-six Works – Edition Espace-Abstraction.