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Colour, Form – All-Over and Ornament
Bettina Weiss produces iconic images that, once seen, linger in the memory.

The reduction to simple geometric forms (including circle segments) as well as radiating and fan-like bundles of colour fields are paired with the colour palette appropriate for each picture, each of which constitutes a sign-like pictorial pattern, which in its presence experiences the striking limitation of an all-over principle (towards ornament): The pictures could continue endlessly into space, but find their determinacy and pictoriality through the delimitation of the picture’s edge. The picture, whose ground can be the bevelled back carpenter’s board, stands out from the wall, is lifted into the room, lets space in behind itself and yet reposes in itself. The fragility of the layers of colour, separated from each other in the creative process by masking, permit differences in elevation barely perceptible to the eye, generating a further element of tension and encouraging the visual interlocking of the fields of colour and form. The eye goes for a walk. The puzzle of bright, transparent and muted colours, giving them lightness and gravity, is a concrete objective of the artist. Weiss creates a matrix variable in form and colour, which is self-aware and open to experimentation. The often parallel choice of paint materials underlines this: oil, acrylic, putty (often also pasty paint) and the wood or canvas ground with its grains, bulges, scratches and textures and, more recently, collage.
Despite their composition of many individual forms and colours, the works repose in themselves and invite the viewer to stroll through them and contemplate them.