David Weishaar
Eyelids, towards Night
June 12 to August 15, 2026
opening on June 11 from 6 to 9 pm
Text by Domenico de Chirico
Night, in David Weishaar’s painting, never merely corresponds to an atmospheric condition. Rather, it is a mental space, a perceptual threshold, an emotional territory within which images slowly emerge, like memories resisting oblivion or presences refusing to disappear. The exhibition title, Eyelids, towards Night, allegorically suggests this movement: the gradual lowering of the eyelids not as a concluding gesture, but as an opening toward a different form of vision. Not a withdrawal of sight, but its continual transformation. Weishaar has developed a painterly practice that places the human body and its relationships at its center, while simultaneously investigating the affective, political, and social dimensions of contemporary human experience. The figures inhabiting his paintings often belong to his closest circle—friends, partners, familiar presences—transfigured through painting without ever losing their existential concreteness. What emerges, however, is not the individual portrait but a shared condition, a common vulnerability manifested through suspended gestures, introspective postures, and gazes that seem to originate from some hidden elsewhere.
The subjects animating his pictorial stage never impose themselves upon the viewer; rather, they appear. They surface furtively from the painted surface like images in the process of formation, held within an intermediate zone between embodiment and dissolution. Their faces are often partially concealed by shadow, while their bodies seem to thin out into glazes, reflections, chromatic tears, and transparent layers of color. Painting thus becomes a site of continuous negotiation between presence and absence, between what reveals itself and what remains undeniably concealed.
Within this rarefied visual universe, these ghostly presences do not assume supernatural characteristics but instead embody a complex contemporary emotional condition. The queer figures populating the artist’s works are imbued with an almost sacred gravity, suspended between fragility and quiet resilience. Far removed from any rhetoric of victimhood, they assert a form of persistence that manifests precisely through their apparent precarity. Their presence is discreet yet unwavering, like something that continues to exist despite the relentless processes of erasure, invisibilization, and marginalization.
Weishaar’s painting is also permeated by a constant fascination with thresholds. Curtains, windows, arches, grilles, veils, and clusters of vegetation do not simply serve a compositional function; they become membranes, surfaces of passage or resistance. Here and now, every element seems to point toward the existence of another space, a dimension that withdraws from complete visibility in order to preserve itself. Light itself participates in this liminal logic: artificial glimmers, iridescent reflections, and almost digital halos traverse the darkness, creating zones of appearance that destabilize the distinction between the real and the fictive.
From this perspective, David Weishaar’s practice ventures into territories that evade any singular definition: phantasmagorical cities, interiors saturated with memory, dark and almost fairy-tale-like forests—places where color is not merely an aesthetic element but a tool for giving form to the ineffable. His canvases generate atmospheres that are at once intimate and spectral, where darkness does not signify absence but rather a dense, tangible, almost material presence. Dominated by deep greens, cool blues, and veiled blacks, his palette recalls the legacy of Gothic sensibility and Romantic melancholy while translating them into a profoundly contemporary language.
The figures, often isolated or gathered within an introspective dimension, seem to inhabit ritual spaces permeated by silence, anticipation, and subterranean tensions. What emerges are genuine inner landscapes, fluid dimensions in which thought intertwines with matter and time appears lyrically suspended. The paintings are never static: the painterly gesture accompanies the oscillations of consciousness, transforming each work into an investigation of space and the invisible emotional geometries that shape human experience, as though every image were situated on the threshold of an infinite horizon that continually reflects and regenerates itself.
His research appears to recover certain aspects of Dark Romanticism and, more specifically, Gothic aesthetics, translating them into a radically contemporary and deeply personal sensibility. Yet this is an intimate, domestic, private Gothic: chandeliers, lace, flowers, and ornamental objects lose their decorative function and become emotional relics, traces of a memory that continues to haunt the present. Even flowers, recurring throughout his iconography, assume an ambiguous character: simultaneous symbols of seduction and mourning, desire and vulnerability, beauty and contamination.
The works brought together in Eyelids, towards Night present themselves as narrative fragments, suspended visions unfolding within a lyrical and indeterminate temporality. Something has just happened, or is about to happen, while something else continually escapes the possibility of being fully grasped. Within this suspension, painting reveals itself for what it truly is in Weishaar’s practice: a device of appearance, a place where images attempt to exist despite silence, distance, or the risk of disappearance.
Like eyelids slowly closing to welcome the deepest night, his works invite a mode of vision that is less assertive and more receptive to uncertainty. In this oscillation between opening and closing, the eyelid does not simply signify the end of sight but its continual evolution: a living membrane regulating the passage between the visible and the invisible, between presence and fading, between light and darkness. In this sense, vision approaches the extreme tension explored by Georges Bataille in his novel Story of the Eye, where the eye is never merely an organ of sight but a point of instability, a threshold at which seeing may collapse into vertigo and disorientation.
It is a vision capable of inhabiting shadow without impoverishing it, recognizing within the fragility of the presences that traverse it a possibility for resistance, care, empathy, and endurance—in that subtle tension between what we see and what looks back at us, which Georges Didi-Huberman identified as one of the primordial conditions of the image.
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