Oliver Wagner: Rehearsal

Wagner distinguishes between two modes of production: the Reconstructed Paintings, where cascades of paint dust are
scattered and allowed to settle, and the Removed Paintings, gestural compositions in which the act of erasure is as significant as accumulation. Both approaches extend into a post-conceptual lineage, interrogating the semiotics and histories of painting while foregrounding the process as performance. Rehearsal becomes the operative metaphor. The repetitive gestures, scattering, tipping, cleaning, wiping away, build muscle memory, a choreography of labour in which skill and chance remain in constant negotiation. Each decision is provisional - to keep or to erase, to trust or to doubt, to fail productively. In this sense, Wagner’s methodology is less about control than about cultivating the conditions under which
surprise, divergence, and renewal can emerge.

Each canvas operates less as a resolved endpoint than as a threshold into multiplicity. What we encounter in the gallery is not the performance itself but its residue, works that are at once material documents and speculative prompts. The viewer is invited to imagine the actions they cannot see: the repetitions of scattering and brushing, the adjustments of the body, the hesitations between erasure and the desire to add.