Pictorial Representation and the Use of Graphic Elements, as Exemplified by His Complete Body of Work
In the work of René Mayer, each painting, each sculpture, each visual fragment seems to emerge from the same breath: a rigor without stiffness, a movement without emphasis, a fidelity to form without dependence on style. From his earliest abstract works, created in the 1970s after his studies at the School of Applied Arts in Basel, René Mayer has explored what would become the guiding thread of his entire practice: the tension between order and disorder, between system and intuition. His approach is rooted in a plastic logic in which pictorial representation and the use of graphic elements are not two separate domains, but two facets of the same inquiry. This articulation is evident throughout his body of work—as seen in the series Boxes, for instance, or in Finitude, Eyes, Moving Earth, and equally in the sculptures of the Viva Viva and Marble & Granite series.
Boxes: the Force of Escape Within the Structure
The series Protégé ou enfermé — Kasten in German, a word with a double meaning, referring both to social “castes” and to rigid “boxes” or containers — is arguably one of the most dense and obsessive bodies of work in René Mayer’s oeuvre. It asserts itself through the richness of its formal variations, but above all through the consistency of an ethical and visual inquiry: are we confined in order to be protected, or protected at the cost of being confined? From this central tension, René Mayer explores an endless range of compositions in which pictorial representation and the use of graphic elements become tools for a meditation on assignment, freedom, and the ambiguity of our relationship to structure.
This series was born of a shock. During business trips to India, where he oversaw the production of his marble and granite sculptures by small local workshops, René Mayer discovered the realities of the caste system. He was struck by how certain individuals, though confined within a theoretically immutable social framework, nevertheless managed to break free through education, creativity, or vital impulse. This tension between imposed condition and desire for emancipation becomes the visual core of Protégé ou enfermé. Each canvas becomes a space of mental simulation: what happens when one is born inside a square, a box, a caste? Is one locked inside, or is there a point of escape?
In these paintings, square forms dominate, but they are often “punctured,” broken, fragmented, disrupted by other visual elements. Colored circles pierce them, grids cover them, triangular tips — evoking spears or dynamic commas — infiltrate or cross through them. These graphic elements are not decorative: they embody an active force, a movement that disrupts order. This is where pictorial representation and graphic strategies take on a subtle political dimension: without ever depicting a scene, René Mayer reveals a logic of relationship — between enclosure and escape, between framework and overflow.
Some motifs, like repeated stamps or mechanical patterns, evoke perpetuated social status, the reproduction of inherited systems. But this repetition is often disorganized, altered, off-center. René Mayer sometimes works freehand, sometimes with stencils or stamps, emphasizing the ambiguity of these forms: they are both rigorous and vibrant. One of the series’ signature techniques is to fade the edges of squares, as if erased or worn away. It’s not about dissolving structure, but showing that any structure can wear down, crack, or open.
Color plays a crucial role. Bold and bright, but applied transparently, the tones interact, overlap, sometimes contradict. The eye glides from one element to another without hierarchy, as if to mimic the impossibility of fixing a center. In some canvases, one motif seems dominant — a strong square, a red circle, a dense grid — but then recedes in favor of a more fluid interplay. That’s the crux of this series: revealing the authority of forms while exposing their fractures. Pictorial representation and graphic elements here are not aesthetic choices, but strategies for thinking.
Ultimately, Protégé ou enfermé is less a series about oppression than a series about the possibility of release. René Mayer does not denounce: he maps tensions. He shows that confinement is not always visible, that it can present itself as softness, safety, or logic. But he also shows that certain elements — a point, a line, a contrast — can disturb that stability. Each painting becomes a hypothesis: what confines us, what protects us, and how can we tell the difference? In posing these questions through visual language, René Mayer creates a deeply contemporary body of work, in which abstraction becomes a tool of clarity.
Moving Earth: the jolted beauty of a world under pressure
With the series Moving Earth, René Mayer composes a powerful and uneasy homage to nature — a nature that is grand, free, fascinating, but increasingly constrained, wounded, forcibly shaped. Each painting emerges like an imaginary map of a real world, a world in which natural forms — seas, volcanoes, dunes, valleys, mountains, forests — coexist with the traces of human domination. In this cycle, the artist articulates pictorial representation and the use of graphic elements to convey a physical tension: that of a ground that trembles, resists, and sometimes gives way under the pressure of our imprint.
The surface of the paintings is worked in relief: René Mayer uses crumpled paper which he then paints, creating plastic masses that catch and refract light. This pleated material is not a device: it embodies the tectonic movement of the earth, its internal fractures, its ability to shift, to respond. The viewer’s gaze gets lost in the meanders, the folds, the shadowed zones — like in the folds of a landscape seen from above or a geological map. But these natural fields are often interrupted by sharper forms — triangles, crowns, squares, circles — that appear to impose an external logic. It is the human presence entering, imposing itself, slicing through. The visual clash is immediate. The pleated nature is pierced, invaded, delimited. It is no longer freely offered; it is caught in a struggle.
In this series, pictorial representation and the use of graphic elements become inseparable. The folding belongs to the pictorial, but it is framed by a precise graphic vocabulary, often geometric, which introduces a language of control. René Mayer stages the organic beauty of the earth while revealing how this beauty is forced to bend to foreign structures. A mountain becomes a triangle, a soft surface is traversed by a rigid rectangle, an angular crown imposes itself at the top of a solar circle. These intrusions are never neutral. They symbolize human influence — which may be technological, political, economic — on a world that, by its very nature, escapes control.
The choice of colors is both solar and inquisitorial. René Mayer uses deep blues, mineral reds, bright yellows, acidic greens. But these colors are rarely pure: they are often overlaid, partially muted, or clashed with other tones. Again, the goal is not to create decorative harmony, but to convey a visual confrontation. The ground breathes, but under constraint. Free forms are encircled, framed, sometimes trapped. The viewer senses — even without any explicit narrative — that something is at stake here: a silent battle between what grows and what fences in.
René Mayer does not illustrate nature — he thinks it with his hand. He does not aim to depict a specific landscape, but rather to translate the effect produced by a living, moving earth on the artist who contemplates and walks it. This is not a romantic or nostalgic gaze. It is a contemporary gaze: informed, unsettled, inquisitorial. The artist has seen — throughout his travels on every continent — the many faces of nature: that which opens itself, that which withdraws, that which is shaped by humans. And he has chosen to make it a language. Not a cry, but a composition. Not a denunciation, but a vibration.
The works in Moving Earth are both simple and striking. They evoke the raw beauty of a world that continues to resist. The earth here is an active subject, a plastic force. It is not represented from the outside, but experienced from within. Pictorial representation and graphic elements combine to evoke, on a flat surface, a geological and symbolic dimension. The crumpled paper becomes a fault line, the sharp forms become constraints, the surface becomes a tension field. Perhaps this, ultimately, is what this series expresses: the earth is in turmoil — and we are both its children and its aggressors.
The more recent series Imperceptible Shift follows the same logic of discreet disruption. The casino tokens, used as a recurring motif, evoke the loss of control and contemporary unpredictability, but their arrangement is always meticulous, intentional, orchestrated. René Mayer never gives in to dispersion. He uses chance as a trigger, never as an excuse. It is not randomness that governs, but a rigorous engagement with form and space. The visual risk — what is perceived first, the system or the fault? — is here extended through an extreme attention to alignments, size relations, and breaks in continuity. Even the most erratic motif becomes, in his hands, a constructive element. In this series, as elsewhere, pictorial representation and graphic elements serve a quiet but sharp reflection on our relationship to reality.
In the series Finiteness, René Mayer goes even further into the silent complexity of his visual language, confronting geometric abstraction with the soft brutality of the naked body. Here, pictorial representation and graphic elements take on an ambiguous dimension: these are bodies glued, copied, repeated, but never embodied. The artist uses black-and-white photocopies of nude or semi-nude bodies, often young, smooth, erotic — but always anonymous and interchangeable. Their nudity is not expressive: it is standardized, shaped by the codes of media desire. And it is precisely this impersonal surface that René Mayer chooses to transfer onto his canvases, not as a provocation, but as raw material for reflection.
These photocopies are then cut, juxtaposed, layered in an extremely structured collage logic. The graphic aspect does not stop there: it continues in the addition of transparent colored circles, geometric motifs, parallel grids stamped in paint. The image is always framed, but never stabilized. It is subjected to shifts in opacity, transparency, and slippage that evoke both silkscreen and digital retouching languages — except here everything is done by hand. Pictorial representation and graphic elements literally merge: they are not at the service of a motif, they are the motif.
Another fundamental element in this series is the temporality of the material itself. The photocopies, sometimes made years earlier, have yellowed, dulled, absorbed moisture and time. This aging is accepted, even sought. It becomes a silent commentary on the finiteness of the body, the erosion of desire, the programmed disappearance of appearances. Again, René Mayer does not seek to illustrate a theme. He lets the materials speak. He frames, adjusts, but conceals nothing. The figures appear and vanish simultaneously, in a constant oscillation between cool seduction and quiet crumbling.
Color, as often in his work, appears secondarily but decisively. It does not structure the image; it haunts it. The translucent washes of pink, yellow, turquoise, or violet seem to be laid over the bodies like veils or filters. They do not reveal; they disrupt. They alter the balances, blur the boundaries between figure and ground, between construction and erasure. The gaze shifts, hesitates, returns. One thinks they see — then they doubt. It is precisely this zone of uncertainty that René Mayer explores: the point where the image becomes memory, where the body becomes surface.
Finitude or the Erosion of Presence
In Finitude, pictorial representation and the use of graphic elements are diverted from their usual function. They no longer serve to organize or beautify reality. They serve to deconstruct it gently. They reveal what is no longer seen: erosion, repetition, slow disappearance. It is not the bodies themselves that matter here, but what their mechanical reproduction, their collective staging, their silent alteration reveal about our relationship to the visible. Eroticism becomes an almost administrative, standardized datum. Art, in René Mayer’s work, comes as a counterpoint: it does not reject this standardization, but disrupts it, simply by arranging it differently.
Volume as an Extension of the Surface: Tension, Elevation, Permanence
This deep unity between René Mayer’s pictorial series is also embodied in his sculptural work, where form becomes mass, rhythm becomes volume, and surface becomes a taut skin stretched across an inner structure. Two series bear strong witness to this: Viva Viva, modeled in painted terracotta, and Marbre et Granit, scaled up to monumental size by specialist workshops, using a method reminiscent of Jeff Koons’s studio or the late precision of Chillida.
In Viva Viva, René Mayer brings into three dimensions the ongoing dialogue between structure and spontaneity. These sculptures are made at 1:1 scale, by hand, in terracotta, then painted in acrylic using a vivid palette—evoking Mexican folk art. They are visually inspired by driftwood, but without borrowing its material or randomness. They stand as curved, full, dynamic forms. These are upright bodies, in tension. None is reproducible. Each piece is unique, not out of whim, but out of coherence with what it embodies: a fragile balance, a vertical surge, a moving density.
The masses are counterbalanced with silent precision. The base is always exact, never arbitrary. The void becomes an actor; the space between two forms acts like a breath. Here, René Mayer is not sculpting an object: he is sculpting a field of forces. He does not seek monumentality but exactness. And that exactness emerges from a continuous dialogue between intention and material, between free gesture and formal rigor. Graphic art becomes three-dimensional: no longer inscribed on canvas, but within space—through silhouettes, volumes, and axes. These are drawings in balance, figures that stand like well-chosen words in a silent phrase.
At the opposite end of the material spectrum, the Marbre et Granit series embodies a more distant, more meditative permanence. These works are first conceived at reduced scale in clay, then realized in stone by specialized Indian workshops. But René Mayer does not delegate: he directs. Each finished sculpture must correspond to the initial intention, to the exactness of the model. The goal is not to enlarge the sketch, but to recover its density in the weight of stone. One might think of Medardo Rosso’s method in reverse: not to dissolve form, but to incarnate it in mass, while preserving the suppleness of the idea.
Marble and granite were not chosen for their nobility, but for their density. René Mayer is interested in what a form becomes when subjected to weight, polishing, sanding. Once again, a tension appears between the archaic and the constructed, between organic suggestion (some volumes recall torsos, archaeological fragments, eroded natural forms) and formal purity. One might think of William Tucker’s blocks or Tony Cragg’s polished masses, but René Mayer avoids citation. He draws from a personal, silent, non-demonstrative vocabulary. He does not seek to impress, but to maintain a line.
That line runs through his entire body of work, in two and three dimensions. For René Mayer, there is no opposition between painting and sculpture. There is a continuity of intention: to place a just form, in the right place, with the density it requires. In both his canvases and his volumes, pictorial representation and graphic art act as revealers. They say nothing. They frame, organize, intensify. They allow us to see what in the world is fragile and irreducible. It is never about depiction, but interrogation.
This posture—craft-based in the noble sense—places René Mayer in a lineage of artists for whom form is not a result, but a responsibility. Neither conceptual nor formalist, he works in the interstice. Between structure and impulse. Between the visible and the active. What he composes are thought-objects that do not speak, but stand there, upright, and look back.
Conclusion: A Liberated Mind Gives Rise to a Calibrated Body of Work
In René Mayer’s work, nothing is left to chance — and yet, everything seems to breathe. This paradox is the foundation of a singular body of work, built far from the spotlight, without compromise or desire to impress. René Mayer doesn’t seek to seduce, nor even to explain. He doesn’t theorize, he does. His language is plastic, non-verbal. And that is precisely where its strength lies.
By tirelessly exploring the interplay between pictorial representation and graphic form, René Mayer has shaped an aesthetic of tension: between form and matter, between constraint and release, between abstraction and anchoring in the world. Each painting, each sculpture opens a space to reflect on what moves through us: assignments, fragile equilibriums, slow degradations, forces that operate in silence.
Far from schools, trends, or programmatic discourse, René Mayer follows a personal path, one that is patient and irreducible. He doesn’t belong to a movement; he digs a furrow. And this furrow is inhabited — by the contradictions of the real, by the silences of the gaze, by a concern for the just form. A form that doesn’t seek to state, but to show. A form that addresses the gaze without ever forcing it.
In an artistic landscape often saturated with effects and postures, René Mayer’s work operates differently. Through its coherence, density, and persistent discretion, it reminds us that art can still — quietly — offer a vision of the world. A vision that is fragmented, unstable, yet precise. A vision that doesn’t fill in gaps, but instead illuminates what we hadn’t yet known how to see.
