Can the force of destruction ever be an act of creation?

Text by Sandrine Welte, art historian and curator

Throughout history, the ethos of making art has always implied a constructive act: The synthesis of colour, material and form towards the creation of something of aesthetic merit and communicative power. The layering of pigment on a given support contrasted with the carving of diverse media, aimed at a final work of expressive renown. Composition, arrangement and organisation lay at the heart of all creative practice, operating as the guiding principles for the intended opus to come to life.

This century-old tradition of painting and sculpting however comes into question with Simon Berger, who intrigued by the affordances of his material of choice pushes the boundaries of art through his pioneering technique. In a reversal of established genres, he sculpts paintings in glass, ‘drawing‘ on the flat surface of his vitreous canvas. Careful strokes of a brush turn into pondered blows of a hammer as the artist incises the traits of his subjects and motifs in a mesmerising process he refers to as “morphogenesis“. Evoking the formation of organic structures through a mechanical force that generates stress and jolts something new into existence, his is a gesture of unrestrained might, an act of impassioned force, a bold demonstration of creative vision that defies the canons of creation. Portraiture, in an unexpected, unthinkable twist, thus moves beyond the brush and the easel, beyond the chisel and the rasp as through his hands, the idea of painting and sculpting are challenged and re-written.

“Human faces have always fascinated me“ - Simon Berger asserts. It is this fascination with the face - the canvas of the soul - that lies at the heart of his artistic research which he translates into intriguing portraits of great allure. Their powerful appeal thereby resides not only in the expressive force of the sitter‘s eyes but moreover the artist’s material of choice. Glass, one of the hitherto undervalued media for creative endeavours, serves in its rich semantics as a starting point for a portraiture of unprecedented kind. The cracks and creases Simon Berger drives into the surface of his vitreous material resonate with the force of a powerful incursion, while creating an echo that reverberates through the final image he carves and ultimately liberates from the depth of the glass pane. In its dichotomous nature - liquid and solid, transparent and opaque, fragile and strong - glass acts as a vibrant support for a new hyperrealistic portraiture. As a material that lends itself to a double modality of being both looked at and through, glass affords a subtle play with as well as allusion to the innumerable facets that constitute the human psyche and mind. Deemed one of the greatest - for impenetrable and hence unresolved - mysteries, the human condition is revealed in its fragile strength through the artist who virtuously exploits the transparency of the glass pane by daring a glance ‘beyond painting‘.

The human face, the most elaborate of all masks, emerges inadvertently in a form of anti-creation, coming into being through the shattering stroke of Simon Berger‘s bold artistic gesture. By this revolutionary creative act, modes of seeing and perceiving are questioned as the image constantly hovers between disintegration and reconstitution, intrinsically bound to the viewer‘s perspective. The perceptual challenge Simon Berger confronts the beholder with proves integral to his work, a reversal of common habits of looking rooted in a tradition of the ‘static‘ picture. Instead, his are animated portraits whose dynamic nature speaks to an aesthetic phenomenology in the perception of art that lives by the concrete, physical experience of the glass canvas. “The artwork is present“, the new adage goes. A presence whose seductive force intricately, inadvertently ties beholder to beheld as the vitreous surface turns into a mirror for the viewer to project themselves. Of intimate allure, the encounter with Simon Berger‘s works comes as an unexpected shock, for exerting an irresistible pull that draws in the respective individual.

Moving close up to the image, the cracks and creases turn into singular happenings, unique and solitary instances dissociated from the general image. As such, they unfurl as records of their own creation, recalling the origin of their being - a hammer blow eternalised on the glass surface. Irregular formations, the breaks radiate outwards, implying the fragile threads of life. In their entanglement, they shape into lines of thought, an inquiry into the nature and psyche of a person.

The process of intuiting, sensing and capturing a biography, a story or a narrative thereby lies at the heart of Simon Berger‘s artistic endeavour. The breakages emerge as moments in an individual‘s life, evocative metaphors of situations lived between fragility and strength. In their fragile constitution, the glass canvases come to stand for the human condition in its delicate, many-layered facets. Concerned with translating the complexity of life into paintings, Simon Berger incessantly experiments with new techniques, intent on finding other, previously unexplored forms of expression. From hyperrealistic portraits rooted in concrete figuration, the artist’s move into abstraction accordingly affords a new language of different striking force, allowing for a nuanced approach to his subject.

Shifting focus to abstract modes of representation, the question of likeness surfaces, tied to the inquiry into what constitutes an individual. The long-standing, eminent genre of portraiture with its historical records of capturing a sitter’s presence is by this lent a further dimension through Simon Berger‘s revolutionary technique and the vitreous paintings he creates. Through his works, the beholder is challenged to revisit previously held assumptions about artistic conception and the process of making something meaningful. The act of destruction becomes a force of creation, generating ‘painted sculpture‘ and ‘sculpted painting‘ in a reversal of practices and traditions towards a new understanding of expressive composition. On these grounds, Simon Berger‘s art can be an invitation to look again to see anew.

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Sandrine Welte is an art historian and curator whose work focuses on contemporary artistic practices and their theoretical foundations. Through her writing and exhibition projects, she explores materiality, perception, and the evolving languages of visual culture. Her research-driven approach bridges historical context and present-day experimentation, fostering critical dialogue around contemporary art.