Patrick Rohner – Faltungen
Museum Bickel
September 18 \u2013 November 22, 2026
Walenstadt \/ Switzerland<\/p>\n
The Bickel Museum in Walenstadt (Canton of St. Gallen) is dedicating an impressive exhibition to Patrick Rohner\u2019s current body of work. For more than thirty-five years, the Glarus-based artist has been exploring ways to translate geological phenomena and their visible effects in nature into painting. In doing so, he pursues a conceptual, interdisciplinary approach that, alongside painting, incorporates other media such as drawing, photography, and film, as well as scientific findings from geology, mineralogy, and climate research. A cursory glance at his paintings makes it already clear that Patrick Rohner is not concerned with a representational or illustrative rendering of landscape, nor with a realistic depiction, nor with an expressive, gestural form of painting. To describe him as a landscape painter would be far too simplistic.<\/p>\n
Patrick Rohner prepares meticulously for his exhibitions. He studies geological and geomorphological maps and historical reports, and conducts field surveys during which he takes digital photographs and, at times, drone footage or video recordings, in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the geological, mineral, and organic structures of each location. The title of the exhibition, \u201cFoldings\u201d was chosen deliberately and refers, on the one hand, to the striking geology of the Churfirsten and the spectacular rock fold (syncline) of the Sichelchamm, where the immense forces of Alpine orogenesis remain visible even to the untrained eye to this day; and, on the other hand, to the artist\u2019s process-oriented, methodical practice, in which insights from art, science, and philosophy are continuously and comprehensively interwoven and synthesized.<\/p>\n
Patrick Rohner\u2019s oil paintings\u00a0are challenging both visually and aesthetically. We are called upon to engage with complex and contradictory elements that must first be made accessible and interpretable, both intellectually and sensually. The unusual, strikingly dynamic, fissured, and rugged surface texture of these paintings takes time to get used to. This effect results from nearly thirty different, technically complex processes and interventions that the artist has developed over the years. Thus, paint is not only applied with palette knives and other objects but is also, at times, removed over large areas or transferred to other supports. Paintings of the same size are sometimes pressed together, so that when they are separated, traces or flecks of paint from the still-wet layers remain on them. Layers of paint that have already begun to dry are milled away, leaving only traces behind, or dry pigments are sifted onto surfaces that are still wet. In the process, the artist mixes up to one hundred kilograms of oil paint with linseed oil and pigments himself and works on several paintings of the same size simultaneously. These processes continue over months, often over several years, until a painting has achieved the density desired by the artist.<\/p>\n
Equally radical\u2014both in terms of the tools and methods used and of the resulting images\u2014are the interventions Patrick Rohner carries out in his water works. For these works, the artist constructs special tubs in a laboratory-like setting, into which the papers are placed and weighted down with stones. Over the course of a work process lasting many months, water saturated with color pigments is poured into these tubs again and again. This does not result in a diffuse, murky mixture of colors. As the water gradually evaporates, the pigments settle and arrange themselves according to their molecular structure. The images, so to speak, paint themselves. The laid paper used for these works is pushed to its limits\u2014and beyond. Corrugations and creases must be pressed flat, and tears and holes must be patched from the back with pieces of paper.<\/p>\n
The traces of time and their creation are clearly visible in these paintings. Nevertheless, they astonish with remarkably natural-looking painterly layers and color gradients, which evoke associations with precisely those geological processes and landscape structures that we can observe in nature. In his water-based works\u2014and more recently in his oil paintings as well\u2014Patrick Rohner is increasingly creating vertical formats that establish an entirely new approach to landscape painting, extending the pictorial space vertically rather than horizontally. In fact, neither the portrait nor the landscape formats feature a clearly defined horizon line. Viewing the paintings evokes an \u201call-over effect\u201d comparable to that of American Color Field painting. Comparisons with Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, or Helen Frankenthaler are certainly appropriate here. Thanks to a spatially convincing sense of depth, expanse, and space, one feels as though standing in the middle of a landscape or viewing it from a bird\u2019s-eye perspective. Without a human scale or man-made conventions, these paintings cannot be interpreted through a conventional narrative. As a viewer, one feels like a pioneer before these paintings, to whom a new world is being revealed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Patrick Rohner – Faltungen Museum Bickel September 18 \u2013 November 22, 2026 Walenstadt \/ Switzerland The Bickel Museum…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367266,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-367265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}