Thierry Wurmser

"Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul." Thus begins one of the most beautiful poems of Baudelaire 's Fleurs du Mal : man loves the sea because he recognizes there an image of himself, of his life, which is continuous movement, sometimes violent and restless, sometimes serene and calm. In the vastness of the sea, in its elusive beauty, the perpetual flow of being and nature is reflected.

These thoughts arise spontaneously when looking at the pictorial activity of Thierry Wurmser, whose research is nourished by a sincere lyrical impulse, capable of generating abstract images, lit and heated of a life which is at the same time that of the man and the cosmos: in these thick waves of colors, which stratify, penetrate each other, merge with a march that is sometimes intense and frantic, sometimes slow and fluid, it appears that a transitory moment of the infinite transformation of things is eternalized . Not the pulsation of this or of some reality interests the painter, but the very substance of life.

One has the impression of being able to grasp, in the hypnotic force of its chromatic waves, in the vivid materiality of a fresh and spontaneous touch, or in certain concretions of colors, nature itself in its primordial and thousand-year-old processes: the miracle of marvelous stripes of the stones fruit of a very long geological work, the magic of certain glacial landscapes, the mystery of the chromatic vibrations and the luminous reflections of the sea, the sublime magmatic charm of the volcanic phenomena. It is by remaining at the level of abstraction that Wurmser can give his work a cosmic and existential value at the same time. Indeed, as man can recognize in the sea a sort of alter ego , so when we observe Wurmser's "abstract nature", we experience the sensation of looking at something that is very close to us, to our interiority: us. let us perceive its images not as distant entities of our soul, but as something which belongs to us in depth and which at the same time is part of the world which surrounds us.

At the beginning of his activity Wurmser represented human figures sketched out on fresh layers of color; vibrating figures of chromatic matter which could already be called abstract: one can already foresee the successive research of the painter, aiming to fix on the canvas the vacillations of consciousness and of being.

In his latest production, human figures have reappeared: a people of perennial silhouettes, squirted with distress, who seem to dance in the air like butterflies, or who look at us with a grotesque aspect. This is how a world of imaginary characters is born, a delicate and ironic world, light and deep. Even in this case his paintings cannot be defined as “figurative": generated with a spontaneous and dynamic touch, Wurmser's creatures are only subtle embodiments of moods, presenting themselves to the viewer as traces. transients of physical and psychic life. Such strangeness to mimetic concerns, this lyrical abandonment to the rhythm of inner existence, expresses what a famous French singer, Souchon, called “thirst for the ideal".

His most recent production falls into two different categories yet unified by research into color transparency. The first concerns the Dolomites series in which the artist creates shapes similar to sharp mountains, which precisely recall the Dolomites, light and fluid, very delicate: forms of thought that establish an equivalence with forms of nature. The second offers compositions with geometric figures permeable to light and color - rectangles, circles, squares, - superimposed, staggered, hollowed out and rhythmic in a subtle and refined play of transparencies.