Abstract sculpture and painting by René Mayer – discreet works with a powerful presence
For over fifty years, René Mayer worked in the shadows: abstract paintings, modeled sculptures, clay maquettes and pieces, entire series never shown. It was only in 2023 that his work entered the public sphere, with a major exhibition at Spazio Arte Bubbio in Italy. Nothing had foretold this late emergence: no career plan, no diffusion strategy, no concern for recognition. The artist had simply continued creating without interruption, in the silence of his studio, with absolute fidelity to material, gesture, and form. This withdrawal, far from being a rejection of the world, allowed for the patient construction of a dense, demanding body of work, marked by astonishing formal coherence.
René Mayer’s sculpture and abstract painting revolve around fundamental tensions: between weight and lightness, surface and volume, apparent stillness and contained energy. His works do not aim to narrate or illustrate. They do not align with any school or manifesto. Their abstraction stems neither from an intellectual posture nor from a stylistic claim: it emerges from within the material, through the slow elaboration of balance. Each painting, each sculpture, is the result of a long, empirical, attentive process in which the hand tests, adjusts, polishes, reworks. A sparing use of means runs through the whole: nothing is demonstrative, nothing decorative. And yet the presence is strong, immediate, almost vibratory.
Our perception of these works changes over time. At first we see simple forms — circles, colored modules, contained figures — but as the eye adjusts, a multitude of nuances is revealed: subtle color pulses, interstices, invisible tensions between elements. The whole functions like a perceptual system: it forces us to slow down, to look differently, to suspend reading habits. This is not spectacular art—it is art as concentration. It does not seek to please but to open an inner space.
Today, the first public exhibitions of René Mayer’s series help us understand the underlying logic: an abstraction shaped by the hand, color giving form to volume, sculpture conceived in motion. Far from trends and effects, René Mayer offers a discreet yet profound form of art. He invites us not to interpret, but to perceive. To sense what form, light, and matter might still say — if we take the time to listen.
Exploration of a Formal Language between Volumes, Tensions, and Perceptual Games
René Mayer’s abstract painting and sculpture unfold like an alphabet of elementary forms — circles, slits, edges, solids and voids — that the artist combines, deconstructs, and reworks with unwavering focus for over half a century. Working far from art fairs, networks, and curatorial frameworks, he has developed an operative mode free from short-term demands: each canvas, each volume is the result of slow, invisible maturation, conducted in the solitude of his Piedmontese studio. This withdrawal has never produced a hermit’s body of work; rather, it has offered the silence necessary to probe the relationship between weight and lightness, opacity and transparency, stillness and vibration. From this emerges a body of work of rare density, where coherence is not a stylistic choice, but the logical outcome of listening to the material.
For René Mayer, fidelity is not synonymous with repetition: it stems from an ethic of gesture. The brush does not cover — it reveals the latent tension of a surface. The chisel does not carve a form — it frees a pre-existing balance within the block. This nearly artisanal approach goes hand in hand with rigorous method: pigment tests, calibration of color fields, evaluation of raking light on polished marble. The artist considers each stage as an act of knowledge; the final result, whether pictorial or sculptural, retains the memory of these investigations.
The viewer is invited to retrace this path: at first, one sees an ordered set of signs, then discovers — as the eye adjusts — micromovements, minute color shifts, interstices that let air and light circulate. The entire setup is designed to activate perception: to contemplate the work is to simultaneously experience its balance and fragility, its presence and the energy that animates it.
A Plastic Abstraction Without Doctrine
In René Mayer’s work, abstraction is never an intellectual stance or a reference to a historical school: it arises from a slow observation of the latent forces that shape space. On his canvases, the slightest fragment of color is the result of attentive vision: he tests the density of a blue, adjusts the intensity of a red, fine-tunes the luminous breath of a green until achieving the internal vibration that holds the whole together. Nothing tells a story; everything builds a perceptual field where figures, planes, folds, and counterfolds attract or repel like microscopic tectonic plates.
This apparent simplicity conceals a demanding constructive process. Some compositions resemble diagrams or networks: webs of thin lines, clusters of circular modules, chromatic slabs nested in a familiar grid. Yet the decorative effect is always thwarted. A chromatic silence suddenly opens a void, a slight axial shift disrupts symmetry, a tonal slip allows the surface to breathe. The eye is caught in a back-and-forth: it moves from a global contemplation to a detailed reading, discovering that each outline, each interval, each hue serves as a hinge between stillness and movement.
In this system, René Mayer’s hand remains tangible, though never demonstrative; one senses it placing, testing, refining, as if each trace emerged from an active meditation. Where others exhaust the surface through excess, he practices economy: a light stroke, a subtly inflected edge, is enough to heighten visual tension. The abstract painting and sculpture he constructs reject the spectacular while deploying contained energy; abstraction becomes not a style, but a means to explore the perpetual adjustment of opposing forces: fullness and restraint, chromatic magnetism and the silence of the support.
An abstract sculpture in constant motion
René Mayer’s abstract sculpture, particularly in the “Viva Viva” series, extends into space the tensions already at work in his paintings. It never illustrates an idea, much less represents a world. It emerges instead as an autonomous organism, composed of volumes that are irreducible to any known reference. There is no evocation of nature, no anatomical suggestion, no submission to a predetermined symbolism: the forms exist according to their own laws, shaped by a gaze that seeks less to impose than to reveal. The masses are not arranged as static elements, but as fragments of expanding energy — unstable, mutable, animated by an almost vibratory internal dynamic.
What strikes first is their relation to balance: many sculptures from the Viva Viva series seem on the verge of tipping over, exploding, or opening up. Some shoot upward like compressed matter, others twist in on themselves, coil, contract, or release. This impression of movement is not depicted — it is built into the material mass itself.
Color, in this abstract sculpture and painting, plays a decisive role. It is never secondary. Pure red, bright blue, acidic green, solar yellow: these hues clash, converse, extend, or confront one another. Yet they never appear as mere surface. They cling to the form, wrap around it, cut through or reactivate it. Their combinations may at times evoke play, carnival, or even the popular design of the 1970s. Yet this vitality never dissolves into the decorative. It is held, framed, thought through in every inflection of the volume.
The body of work comprising the “Viva Viva” and “Marble & Granite” series presents a universe of abstract forms that remain constantly active, never frozen. It is a body of work that does not seek to represent, but rather to provoke a physical rapport with the viewer — someone who looks, approaches, circles. René Mayer does not aim for spectacle, but for the emergence of presence: sculpture that thinks through forms and makes us think through them.
For the “Marble & Granite” series, the artist first models each sculpture in terracotta at a reduced scale, before it is transposed to its final size in stone by Indian workshops following his precise instructions. This process gives the form a tactile anchoring that preserves its original freshness while ensuring its monumental presenceA
Color and volume – a productive tension
In René Mayer’s singular universe, color is never an addition or a simple visual attribute. It lies at the heart of the process, inseparable from form and intention. In his abstract sculpture and painting, color functions as a constructive force, a vector of tension, rhythm, and spatiality. It does not accompany volume: it generates it, sculpts it, destabilizes it, or reinforces it. For René Mayer, there is no hierarchy between the elements of form. Drawing, structure, material, and color all contribute to the same breath, like the members of a coherent organism.
An art without assertion – but not without ethics
René Mayer often says he sees himself above all as a craftsman: a worker of the hand, the eye, and the material, more than a ‘creator’ in the spectacular sense of the word. This statement is neither false modesty nor marketing posture; it reflects his daily way of inhabiting the studio, of facing the modeling table or blank canvas without immediately trying to impose a concept, a theory, or a slogan. Each piece begins with the same ritual: preparing pigments, touching clay, testing the density of a piece of wood or the roughness of a canvas. In this assumed repetition, René Mayer finds the ground for a patient investigation: he listens to the resistance of the material, accepts surface accidents, refines the gesture until the form finds its own point of balance. Ethics are already present in this discipline: rejecting ease, accepting long timeframes, preferring silent precision to immediate effect.
No political manifesto, no environmental declaration precedes his works, and yet the viewer perceives a clear commitment: that of remaining faithful to what is happening, there, between the hand, the light, and the raw material. In his abstract paintings as well as in his modeled volumes, René Mayer does not aim to ‘denounce’ or ‘illustrate’; he seeks the precision of a tension, the accord of a tone, the breath of a void. The surfaces seem to open to the light without ever trapping it; the colors, often vivid, vibrate without excess because their intensity has been chosen, mixed, and tested over time. Even the tactile dimension — acrylic grains, terracotta ridges, polished marble or granite — participates in an assumed responsibility: to offer the viewer an honest experience, free of imposed effects, able to leave room for one’s own emotional response.
What strikes, when moving through a series of canvases or a grouping of sculptures, is the consistency of a single level of demand. No piece seems decorative or anecdotal; each bears the mark of equal attention, whether large or more modest in scale. One finds no gratuitous virtuosity in René Mayer’s work: no flamboyance, no spectacular wink. Instead, there is an active, open beauty that asserts itself through the constancy of an inner breath. In front of these works, the gaze adjusts, the mind suspends itself; time expands slightly, just enough to perceive the nuance of a glaze, the break in a line, the echo of negative space. Thus the artist-craftsman invites the viewer to slow down, to maintain the gaze, to suspend automatic judgment. His absence of claim becomes an offered latitude: that of contemplating without constraint, of letting an emotion arise, a question, a personal memory — in short, of consciously participating in the precision of the gesture being observed.
This approach is reflected in the very choice of materials. The paintings are made with acrylic, in bold, saturated layers, applied with assurance. In the “Imperceptible Shift” series, several hundred casino tokens hand-painted by the artist are added. The sculptures in the “Viva Viva” series are modeled in terracotta, then glazed with acrylic. This contrast between a free modeling process and a shiny, sometimes nearly industrial finish produces a particular vibration. The roughness of the initial gesture remains perceptible beneath the sharpness of the vivid colors, creating a permanent tension between spontaneity and rigor, between expressive gesture and precise finish.
In the “Boxes” series, this tension takes on a graphic form. Circles intertwine with grids; figures are contained, as if caught in a network of lines that define them without fully enclosing them. The painting becomes a space of negotiation between order and disorder, between openness and constraint. One senses a deep questioning of how to contain movement without freezing it, how to articulate vital energy within a formal frame. This paradox — stabilizing the unstable, structuring without reducing — runs through all of René Mayer’s abstract sculpture and painting. It is from this tension that the force of his work arises.
The Late Discovery of a Hidden Corpus
It is striking to realize that René Mayer’s work remained virtually invisible until 2023. For nearly half a century, his abstract paintings, sculptural maquettes, and fully realized sculptures circulated only within the private sphere of his studio. They were shown only to a close circle: family, trusted artisans, and a few confidants whose reactions he occasionally sought out. The idea of exhibiting never truly concerned him; he quietly accumulated canvases, sketchbooks, and clay models in storage areas inaccessible to outsiders, sometimes simply stacked on raw wooden shelves.
When René Mayer decided, for the first time, to make part of his work accessible to the public, he appointed Luca Beatrice — renowned curator, art critic, and professor — to commission the exhibition. This choice was not strategic, but deeply coherent: René Mayer sought an external perspective capable of understanding his work without forcing it into a preconceived theoretical framework. He entrusted Luca Beatrice with the task of selecting, presenting, and commenting on a body of works at SAB, Spazio Arte Bubbio. This move marked a turning point — not the desire to enter an institutional path, but rather the wish to observe how these long-silent forms, recently brought out of the shadows, would resonate in an exhibition space, confronted with unknown viewers.
This decision, far from a career strategy, responded to an inner necessity: to verify the relevance of a body of work developed outside the market, in exclusive dialogue with matter and time.
In unveiling this corpus, René Mayer presented to the public a dense, stratified memory — full of meticulous chromatic variations, volumes in different scales. Many pieces dated back to the 1970s, when René Mayer was already exploring the tension between enclosing and open forms that would later define the series “Boxes”. Other explorations prefigured the emergence of the “Viva Viva” series: small terracotta sculptures, painted in vivid flat colors inspired by Mexican pigments. Until 2023, these works remained buried in the depths of his studio basement, without systematic inventory or professional documentation. Their emergence was not orchestrated as a media operation, but the result of a careful review, piece by piece, to assess condition, record dimensions, and trace internal links between paintings, preparatory drawings, and volumes.
Since these first public presentations, René Mayer’s work has begun to find its place. A few Swiss and international galleries and institutions have requested loans; attentive collectors have taken interest in canvases long kept out of view. But the artist refuses all haste: he examines each request according to its contextual coherence, ensuring that the display allows his works the silence and space to breathe. He does not aim to position himself in any market segment or style label; his priority remains creating a slow, attentive space of interpretation, one that honors the gestural density of a practice removed from the media spotlight. His refusal of commercial pressure reflects his approach to creation: to work in the long term, without seeking approval, in pursuit of a form of rightness that is self-sufficient.
This late entry into the public realm ultimately opens a broader reflection on the very notion of visibility. What does it mean to produce without showing? How can a body of work mature in the shadows, absorb intimate stories, and then suddenly appear as a fully coherent whole? When encountering the presented series — “Boxes”, “Viva Viva”, “Marble & Granite” — the viewer is faced with works detached from the usual announce–vernissage–sale cycle. Now circulating outside the studio, these pieces are not seeking ‘relevance’ in the sense of trends, but instead bear witness to a long-standing commitment: to create in order to render perceptible a quiet equilibrium, a presence that, until now, belonged only to the intimacy of gesture
