Galeria Quadrado Azul is pleased to announce trees growing shadows casting cars crashing, an exhibition by Willem Weismann, which present a new group of paintings, in which he examines our relation with nature and yearns a new spot for humanity’s place in the world.
  

Previous exhibitions functioned more as an archaeological accounting of what is essential and what can be discarded in life, yet these new works look forward to a different tomorrow. Conceived and drawn from his imagination, Weismann leans into representations of experience, instead of relying on the mediated interface of photography, he explores how we shape and are shaped by the ‘more-than-human world’ : a phrase coined in 1996 by cultural ecologist David Abram to signify the broad commonwealth of earthly life, which intended to indicate that human culture was a subset within a larger set - that the human world was necessarily sustained, surrounded, and permeated by the more-than-human world - yet also meant to encourage a new humility on the part of humankind.
  

Correspondingly, ‘plant blindness’, a term coined by botanists educators J. H. Wandersee and E. E. Schussler in 1999, describes the phenomenon of human’s inability to see or notice plants in one's everyday life. It refers to our failure to recognize the role of plants on earth and our historical belief that they are somehow inferior to animals. In Weismann’s work there has long been an attempt to encourage ‘human blindness’; the figures have characteristically functioned more as extras than as lead characters. They are usually obscured or cropped, and in this exhibition they are hidden behind trunks or leaves. Weismann’s plants are found standing side by side with humans, and in some paintings trees are given a metaphorical agency and are depicted saving the lives of humans from crashing cars.
  

Shadows also conceal figures from our scrutiny, and echo a series of paintings produced a decade earlier, in which the artist painted exclusively with a black oil paint made of a coal pigment. The impressionists' dictum was that black should not be used in painting, since it does not exist in nature. Weismann accentuates this unnaturality, and uses black shadows to bring out the definition of shapes and reveal the constructed quality of his compositions. By creating these disruptive gaps among the vibrant hues on the canvas, a discombobulating effect occurs, leaving the viewer to fill in these obscured spaces, both pictorially and interpretatively.
  

The images of destroyed vehicles and slashed tires, repeated in a number of works, provoke a challenge to the viewer, and embody a defeating realization of the apparent futility of an individual’s position to affect any meaningful change. They provide a visual response to Andreas Malm’s How to blow up a pipeline (2021) as well as Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016). The former argues for sabotage as a logical form of climate activism and critiques climate fatalism as well as the nonviolence and pacifism in the climate activist movement, while the latter examines our inability to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
  

Manifesting the destructive side of the creative process, Weismann's works are a reminder that we cannot extract our existence out of nature or simply depict nature in a vacuum by cropping out ourselves and everything that we bring into existence. They propose a new paradigm.
  

This is Weismann’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and follows after ‘Flotsam & Jetsam’ a duo exhibition with Hugo Canoilas in 2022.
  

Willem Weismann lives and works in London, other recent exhibitions include ‘Willem Weismann / Waldemar Zimbelmann’ at Annarumma Gallery, Naples and group exhibitions ‘Slaap!’ at Kunsthal Kade, Amersfoort, the Netherlands, ‘Les Pays-Bas, l'autre pays des beaux-arts’, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Meymac, France and ‘The Stand Ins: Figurative Painting from the Collection’, Zabludowicz Collection, London.
  

This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund.