In his second solo exhibition at Galerie Tassilo Usner, Moritz Berg presents new works under the title “Le vent se lève ! Il faut tenter de vivre !”, works that emerge from close observation of his surroundings. The title is borrowed from the final line of Paul Valéry’s poem “Le Cimetière marin”: “The wind is rising! We must try to live!” At the heart of the exhibition is not the depiction of a place, but the question of what traces an encounter with it can leave behind.
The starting point is fleeting and often inconspicuous moments – a warm breeze, the pink of the evening, or the flickering light between treetops. Berg is interested in how such impressions can be grasped and captured through attentive observation. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s German translation of Valéry’s poem, it reads: “O, the reward, after long thinking / a long gaze upon the calm of the gods!”
Berg’s works, too, grow out of such lingering and looking.
The wind, which in Valéry breaks through the standstill of thought, becomes in Berg’s work an actual movement that he incorporates directly into the drawing process. A pen attached to trees or branches leaves lines and abstract traces through wind and gusts, in which the movements of the place inscribe themselves. What is at first a fleeting gesture is transferred onto the canvas and translated into a new form. The surroundings thus become an active part of the artistic process.
Elsewhere in Valéry’s poem, we read: “Break, my body, this pensive form! / Drink, my breast, the birth of the wind!” These lines point to a turn towards immediate experience, which also shapes Berg’s work. His method makes visible how the encounter with a place can be translated into a pictorial form without depicting its appearance. It directs our gaze to what is easily overlooked and brings out qualities and connections that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. The things themselves remain the same – what changes is the way we encounter them.
