Charlott Weise: For these thoughts we change into pink

An exhibitionary melodrama, one written through the “ecstatic impulse” of painting, For these thoughts we change into Pink is Charlott Weise’s first solo exhibition with Belmacz.

Charlott Weise (b. 1991, Görlitz, Germany) is concerned with being in the world with all its chaoticness and intoxication. Working fluidly, through the instinctual sojourns allowed for as a brush meets canvas, Charlott’s paintings attempt to resolve this experience of being in whilst also aiming to challenge or provoke what existence can be. Written in thick swathes of oil, Charlott’s paintings are more than acts of defiance; they stand tall as gestural traces pulled from the body, the mind. In this way, her works are more like allusive play scripts than solid, didact narratives.

Following this premise, the forms and figurative suggestions—each reaped from Charlott’s extensive inventory of female iconography—that appear in the human-sized paintings and small drawn works in this exhibition act as theatrical portals; they linger as to create a quasi-Kafkaesque mise-en-scène. Charlott’s instinctual approach to painting accentuates this sense of impending performativity, a tentative sense where we feel unsure of what could unfold. Indeed, rather than illustrating a grand narrative theme, here fluid brushstrokes and layers of twisting marks make steadfast narratives leak. Dramatically unmoored, intimate, erotic and made up as if a powder-blushed figure within a Fuseli sketch, the artworks in For these thoughts we change into pink render the artifice of an existence through the formalities of painterly action.