Series, repetition, variation and this in theoretically infinite continuation – the principle of the series is represented several times in Bernhard Paul’s painting. The artistic concept, the music on which the painting is based and the temporal aspect of the production process – all of this is rooted in the serial. For Bernhard Paul, serial production is a pictorial language that he is constantly testing and expanding.
Comparable processes took place in music from 1910 onwards. Just as serial painting called established aesthetic values into question, the currents of so-called “New Music” brought about a reorientation of musical language. Through the gradual abandonment of major-minor tonality through to twelve-tone music, New Music broke with the harmonic system. Dissonance, polyphony and a radically new aesthetic were the result.
Bernhard Paul takes “New Music” as the basis of his art and conceives painting processes from this influence. Paul applies the constant repetitions, constants and interruptions to the canvas as a sequence of brushstrokes and rhythmic ductus. With this process, the artist produces results like the composers: sound, polyphony, dissonance.
Bernhard Paul’s pictures could be understood as painted compositions, as visualized music, but that would not do justice to his painting. It is more than that. The strict uniformity and systematic way of painting creates an irritation in the viewer, an excessive demand in all the clarity of the formal language. When the individually applied colors blend together in the eye of the beholder, when the lines, repetitions and rows are viewed as a whole, a flickering is created that assaults all the senses. The color surfaces of the individual works appear multidimensional and swell into something larger as a series.