American artist Paul Wallach is showing some twenty recent works for his first extensive Parisian exhibition entitled Falling Up. Born in New York in 1960, Wallach studied Art and Applied Arts at the  University of Wisconsin and Boston University, then worked with Mark di Suvero as an artist-in-residence in the 1990s, before moving to Paris –where he still lives– in 1994.

His sculptures are exempt from narrative content. With very few means, they emerge off the wall at a dynamic point and unfold in space, as if suspended in dialogue with it. After an extended moment of observation, the diverse materials, –wood, plaster, fabric, metal and glass– take on a coherence that gives the work unity. These different materials overlap, because of their own specific weight, in order to generate a delicate balance, resulting from the dynamics of gravity. The permanent quest for a center of gravity is thus one of the factors that constructs form.

None of these sculptures can be absorbed at a glance: they change radically according to the spectator’s point of view. The work is an an event that alters in composition from moment to moment under the viewer’s eye. It possesses an essential mobility that is inherent to its discovery, a motion of constant unfolding that also puts the spectator in motion, inviting them into a slow exploratory choreography of their own gravity.

Between the wall and these objects emerges an intermediate space that prompts reflection: a reflexion of the shadows and colors that are an integral part of the work and demand the viewer’s attention. Paul Wallach’s sculpture continually reveals a space in its entirety, including the hidden spaces within the work.

Concentrating space and energy in the intimate quest for a balance of forces, unfolding out into space like spatial dwellings, Paul Wallach’s works are animated by an incessant twofold movement of contraction and expansion which would seem to be the basis of all creation.