A Core Theme – Chance as an Existential Principle
Chance in contemporary art is often explored through formal strategies: aleatory techniques, improvisation, external interventions, or the deconstruction of conscious choices. Yet for René Mayer, chance is not limited to a method. It becomes a theme, a philosophical principle. Through the “Imperceptible Shift” series, the Swiss painter and sculptor turns chance in contemporary art into a lens through which to read our era, our human condition, and our collective blindness to the risks we create.
The choice of the casino chip as the central motif in this series is anything but random — precisely. It condenses an entire constellation of meanings: randomness, of course, but also speculation, loss of control, belief in luck, and that contemporary tendency to delegate responsibility to forces we claim not to control. The chip is not a formal device or visual gimmick — it carries meaning. In René Mayer’s paintings, it is repeated and aligned. It composes calibrated, abstract surfaces, in which every unit reminds us, as the artist himself puts it, that ‘we’re playing with the Earth as if it were a casino’.
This choice is not merely aesthetic — it is conceptual. By placing a symbol of betting and gambling at the heart of his composition, René Mayer questions how contemporary societies integrate — or refuse to integrate — the unpredictable into their structures. In a world saturated with data, algorithms, and predictive simulations, chance is unsettling — because it escapes control. But it is there, irreducible. René Mayer does not seek to tame it or elevate it into an absolute. He shows it in its raw form — as a condition of human existence, a tension between calculation and the unknown.
In this light, chance in contemporary art becomes a mirror of our time — a time that has given up on the idea of total mastery, yet struggles to accept the consequences of its own games. René Mayer does not moralize. He does not depict chaos. He reveals its tiny traces, its nearly invisible drifts, the slow erosion of reference points. What he proposes is a visual reflection on the fragility of balance — a way of inscribing the vulnerability of human systems into form. As Arthur Danto wrote, every artwork contains an implicit philosophy. Here, it emerges in the fragile gap between what we think we control — and what ultimately eludes us.
A New Practice: Painting with Chance
Since 2024, René Mayer has introduced a new element into his practice: the use of a pendulum equipped with a paint-dispersion device. Suspended above the canvas, the pendulum moves in circular or linear trajectories, tracing unpredictable lines across the surface — shaped both by the laws of physics and by the micro-variations of the initial gesture. The result: sprays of paint that cannot be planned or repeated.
This seemingly playful technique is based on a rigorous logic. René Mayer does not relinquish control entirely to the pendulum: he chooses the colors, the positions, the velocities. He prepares the context. But once set in motion, he accepts whatever the trajectory produces. Here again, the point is not spectacle, but a quiet dialogue with unpredictability. This gesture is deeply aligned with the spirit of “Imperceptible Shift”: it integrates chance not as rupture, but as information.
By combining these free dispersions with the rigid grids of the chips, René Mayer overlays two logics: one of control (repetition, grid, structure), and one of randomness (splatter, drip, drift). He does not choose between them. He brings them into tension, makes them coexist within a single image. In doing so, he visually translates the duality that defines us: our desire to control everything, and our chronic inability to anticipate.
The pendulum here acts as a revealer. It does not create form — it releases it. And this form, shaped by chance, comes to disrupt the ordered, fixed surfaces of René Mayer’s earlier compositions. It reintroduces the living, the unstable, the trembling — without destroying the whole. It is an aesthetic of gentle disruption, a subtle detour within a tightly organized structure.
In a broader perspective, this technique also questions the boundary between author and apparatus. By introducing a simple but indeterminate machine into his process, René Mayer shifts the artist’s role. He becomes not merely the executor, but the initiator of a semi-open system. He orchestrates conditions of possibility without guaranteeing the outcome. This move from an authoritarian model to a distributive one echoes concerns in contemporary critical thought — from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Pierre Restany — about the gradual erasure of the all-powerful artist figure.
From this point of view, the use of the pendulum is not just a visual device. It becomes a tool for objectifying gesture, an external agent that compels the artist to relinquish total control. This does not diminish the artist’s responsibility — on the contrary, it redefines it. René Mayer.remains master of the framework, but he accepts that this framework can be disrupted, that meaning may emerge from the unpredictable. This deliberate letting-go lends his work a new density — a way to open form to the event, without dissolving it into pure chance.
Chips, Grids, and Disruptions: An Aesthetic of Near-Order
In most of the works in the “Imperceptible Shift” series, the overall structure is perfectly stable: lines, columns, circles. Everything seems repetitive, almost algorithmic. But upon closer inspection, one notices small anomalies, tiny visual dissonances — a slight tilt, a shift in tone, a microscopic misalignment. These deviations are the very substance of the painting. They embody the idea that disorder never comes from the outside, but from within the system itself. It is at this level that chance in contemporary art takes on a critical dimension: no longer a spectacular rupture, but an internal malfunction — progressive, almost invisible.
This logic of minimal deviation recalls certain lines of research by Gottfried Böhm on form perception and image interpretation. It is not the motif that creates meaning, but the deviation from the motif. René Mayer works in that gray area between repetition and variation, between structure and slippage. He does not paint chance — he paints its traces. In this way, he quietly but persistently reframes chance in contemporary art as a process of internal friction, inscribed in form itself rather than imposed from outside.
The casino chip, in this context, becomes a tool of tension. It crystallizes a world of arbitrary rules (the game), fictitious values (the stake), and irreversible decisions (the throw). By fixing them onto the canvas, René Mayer halts them, freezes them, makes them visible. It is worth emphasizing: the chips do not move. They are carefully affixed to the surface, fully integrated into the composition. But by coloring them differently, tilting them, arranging them according to non-uniform logics, he introduces disruptions, weak signals, zones of interpretation. The work imposes nothing. It suggests an underlying instability — a movement within the form.
Within this tension between order and disruption emerges a genuine formal ethic: art as a place of gentle alert, of visual awareness. No argument, no story. Just a surface that vibrates, that resists immediate reading, that demands one slow down.
This game of nearly imperceptible shifts calls upon an active sensitivity from the viewer. One must recompose the image not by following a narrative line, but by interpreting variation as a signal. Through this micro-dynamic, René Mayer transforms repetition into inquiry, the grid into a field of observation. Each chip becomes a unit of information, a critical module. Regularity is no longer a neutral backdrop, but an unstable reading plane.
In this sense, the entire “Imperceptible Shift” series can be read as a formal allegory of the control society. Where ruptures once appeared sudden and visible, today’s displacements are gradual, subtle, nearly undetectable. René Mayer translates this into visual language: he makes perceptible what is elsewhere diluted by habit. The eye, trained to seek meaning in exceptions, is here forced to look for it in subtle repetition, in slight dislocation. It is a strategy of slow attention, close to what Aby Warburg advocated in the face of the saturation of signs: to see is first to recognize what, within apparent stability, begins to tremble.
Comparisons: Duchamp, Cage, Pollock… and Mayer
It is tempting to compare René Mayer’s approach to that of other artists who have explored the role of chance in contemporary art. Marcel Duchamp, of course, with his ‘Three Standard Stoppages’ — in which threads dropped on the floor become the measure of a new ruler — or his ready-mades, selected ‘out of indifference’. John Cage, who incorporated the ‘I Ching’ into musical composition. Jackson Pollock, whose paint flows followed the gestures of the body. Or Jean Arp, who dropped pieces of paper onto a canvas and fixed them where they landed.
But René Mayer does not pursue this same radicalism. He never relinquishes control — neither in the choice of elements nor in their arrangement. He creates systems in which chance in contemporary art operates as an internal disturbance, not as an absolute principle. In this way, his practice more closely resembles that of Sol LeWitt or François Morellet, who established strict rules while allowing a degree of chance to influence execution.
What distinguishes René Mayer, however, is his association of motif — the chip — with a strong symbolic charge. This is not merely a play of forms. There is an underlying idea: a world driven by blind decisions, a society gambling with variables it no longer understands. The painting thus becomes a critical device — not spectacular, but insidious. It infiltrates the gaze gently, but transforms it lastingly.
His approach is also notable for its lack of theatrics. Where Cage or Arp made the chance gesture the center of their process, René Mayer operates within an economy of signs and details. What interests him is not the jolt of an unpredictable form, but the slow drift of an apparently stable structure. One might even say that René Mayer performs a silent translation of the language of chance — recasting it into a more interior, almost introspective grammar.
He thus joins a more subterranean critical tradition, where chance is not a manifesto but a hypothesis of reading. This aligns his work with a certain strand of European minimalism, where even the slightest shift carries meaning. Yet unlike these often formalist movements, René Mayer introduces a discreet political dimension. He does not denounce — he makes visible what governs our collective choices. That is what gives his work its quiet power: within a tightly framed space, it articulates vast questions.
In the contemporary landscape, few artists articulate societal content with such subtlety through abstract formal decisions. René Mayer claims no message. He makes no commentary. But he makes us see. And what he reveals is a world that is unstable, beautiful — and founded, in part, on an unacknowledged gamble.
Chance and Responsibility – An Ethical Tension
The intrusion of chance, in art as in life, raises a question of responsibility. If everything is random, who is responsible? The artist? The system? The viewer? René Mayer works directly with this tension. He does not hide behind randomness to avoid choices — on the contrary, he uses chance to pose the question of our collective choices.
His works, through their precise composition and discreet use of disruption, confront us with our own relationship to risk, probability, and the management of the unpredictable. The painting becomes a kind of allegory: what happens when a structured system begins to falter? What do we notice first — the order or the crack? What do we prioritize — the beauty of the whole, or the unease introduced by the detail?
There is in René Mayer’s work a kind of lucidity that echoes some of Jean Baudrillard’s analyses: we are caught in self-referential systems, where chance is both feared and staged as spectacle. René Mayer doesn’t play that card. He dramatizes nothing. He exposes a mechanism of drift. He confronts us with the slow transformation of familiar structures — with how a visual order can slip into instability without anyone noticing.
This refusal of theatricality defines the uniqueness of his approach. Where chance in contemporary art is often used to deconstruct or rupture a system, René Mayer makes it invisible — fluid, organic. Disruption is not displayed; it seeps in. It pushes the gaze outside its comfort zone, without provoking either rejection or fascination. It is a strategy of displacement, not subversion.
This approach gives his work a discreet ethical dimension. No slogans. No narrative. Just a silent surface that says: look again. Nothing is stable. Nothing is certain. Everything can tip. And if we fail to notice, it’s not for lack of signs.
From this perspective, chance in contemporary art is no longer just a device — it becomes a revealer of our shared responsibilities. René Mayer doesn’t cancel meaning — he reshapes it. He shows how a work of art can redistribute the field of decision — not just between artist and material, but between image and gaze, between formal stability and perceptual unease.
A Work in Tension – Between Control and Openness
What stands out in the recent evolution of René Mayer’s work is the way he manages to maintain a constant tension between two poles: on one side, an extreme, almost mathematical formal rigor; on the other, a deliberate openness to chance, to the unforeseen, to the uncontrollable. He does not try to reconcile or prioritize them. He places them in deliberate friction — as opposing forces coexisting within the same pictorial space. This opposition becomes the engine of the work, its internal dynamic, its breath.
Pendulum painting is no accident in René Mayer’s practice. On the contrary, it forms the starting point — the base upon which everything is constructed. The pendulum’s movement, subject to gravity, creates fluid, unpredictable lines that immediately introduce a vibration, a subterranean rhythm. This underlying layer, executed with near-choreographic precision, is then overlaid with chips that are meticulously arranged according to a compositional grid. The chips’ fixed rhythm enters into tension with the pendulum’s fluctuations, without ever neutralizing them.
Everything is planned, thought out, ordered. And yet within this plan remains a zone of openness, a space of breathing. It is never chaos — but it is no longer order either. It is a space of uncertainty, a shifting threshold, a perceptual edge where the eye hesitates, oscillates, searching for an anchor it never quite finds. This dialogue between structure and vibration lies at the heart of the work’s effect.
This tension gives René Mayer’s works their power and uniqueness. They don’t offer themselves up in a single glance. They demand prolonged attention, active reading, engagement of both eye and mind. The viewer is not facing an image to decode, but a field of potential interpretations. He becomes a co-author of meaning, caught in a play of unstable balances. Nothing is demonstrative — everything must be felt. This instability is not a surface effect — it is a structural principle. It’s what makes these works feel alive, relevant, in step with our era of uncertainty, constant mutation, and the collapse of fixed reference points.
René Mayer does not create aleatory art. He does not merely hand form over to chance. He creates art that reflects on chance, explores its aesthetic implications — and its ethical ones. This distinction is crucial. Chance becomes a critical tool, a way to question visual automatisms, perceptual certainties, and systems of representation. And this is what allows René Mayer’s work to escape anecdote, decoration, or effect — and to enter a broader reflection: on perception, on the responsibility of looking, on the conditions under which we inhabit the world. In this approach, each painting becomes a perceptual experience — and also a silent inquiry: What do I see? And what do I choose not to see?
Conclusion – An Aesthetics of Inquiry
Chance, in contemporary art, is often used as provocation, as rupture, even as posture. It becomes a spectacular gesture, a way to flaunt radical freedom or defy established norms. In René Mayer’s work, it takes on an entirely different dimension: it becomes a tool of awareness. A discreet but powerful way to question our certainties. It does not seek to shock, but to gently alert. It does not aim for effect, but for awakening. His use of chance is a way to draw our attention to what usually escapes us.
By integrating elements of randomness into rigorous structures, by focusing on subtle drifts rather than visible ruptures, by combining symbolic motifs with unpredictable gestures, René Mayer constructs a body of work that is both demanding and lucid. A body of work that does not speak about itself, but about the world. A body of work that compels us to slow down, to look differently at what we assume to be stable. It’s not order that he deconstructs, but our dependence on order. It’s not chance that he celebrates, but our capacity to face it.
In this sense, René Mayer aligns with a critical tradition — but without dogma, without didacticism, without pathos. He does not denounce. He proposes. He does not moralize. He questions. He creates spaces where the gaze can open to what trembles, to what shifts, to what escapes all fixation. He installs a methodical doubt — without despair. He reminds us that chance is not the erasure of meaning, but a modality of the real that deserves to be taken seriously. The real issue with chance, for him, is not to surrender everything to it — but to learn to see when, how, and why it intervenes. And to understand what that reveals about us, about our choices, about our relationship to the world.
In this way emerges an aesthetics of questioning: a form of art that seeks neither to please nor to shock, but to awaken attention. A form of art that refuses ease, that places its bet on subtlety, on contained tension, on fertile ambiguity. A form of art that closes nothing — but opens — and invites us to think.
