For this year’s edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin, Meyer Riegger shows works by the New York based painter Santiago de Paoli (b. 1978, Buenos Aires) for the first time in Germany.

Words, it seems, are hardly the best intermediaries when it comes to capturing Santiago de Paoli’s paintings. A critic went so far as to describe them as “beasts” some time ago, noting that they “escape any readymade classification or description”. Perhaps de Paoli’s paintings are better grasped in terms of temperature and weight, states of aggregation and compositions of materials, than description in words – words evoking meanings that can only lead us away from the reality of the painting itself, as opposed to toward it. Towards a reality that wants to be felt.

It is, after all, a closeness that de Paoli’s paintings demand. They arch, pulsate, rear up; they fever, stagger, bud and surge. They are erotic, intimate, warm – and yet they are never just one of these, but always already something else as well. They are metamorphoses. Unconventional formats and unusual materials (copper, felt, plaster, recycled textiles or wood) often lend them the look of sculptural objects in space.

In de Paoli’s oeuvre, painting is a link to what lies beyond the visible – which is not to say the invisible, but rather what we see with our eyes closed, what we feel as we vacillate between sleep and wakefulness, between unconsciousness and consciousness.