Vera Palme, Oil on oil at Schleuse, Vienna

Something between skin and membrane. “Sometimes I wonder…” the text echoes, and we find ourselves wondering too: when does a surface stop being itself and become only a remainder? A shed skin, an exuvia, a trace mistaken for presence. We circle the thought as one circles an object not yet understood. Could painting be something worn, then abandoned? Could it be worn again? The metaphor slips, sock, mask, Leatherface, and we follow it, uneasy, amused, slightly disoriented. Nothing here promises restoration. Nothing returns intact. We step further in.

The space at Schleuse holds four works, yet the room feels fuller, as if each painting radiates a quiet insistence. The atmosphere is spare, almost clinical at first glance, then quickly complicated by the surfaces themselves. Light does not simply illuminate; it grazes, catches, hesitates. Visitors slow down, draw closer, then pause, as if unsure whether to trust what they see. The installation is direct, unadorned, giving each work its own field of negotiation. There is no prescribed path, yet we find ourselves moving laterally, back and forth, testing distances, letting one work recalibrate the next. The paintings feel less hung than staged, presented as propositions rather than conclusions.

Material becomes the hinge on which everything turns. Fake leather, pleather, laid over oil paint on fabric, a gesture both literal and oblique. Oil on oil, but not quite. Not really. The industrial grain of the synthetic surface presses against the painterly beneath, creating a tension that refuses resolution. We notice the hardened zits of paint caught under the artificial skin, resisting its flattening claim. The monochrome is never fully flat; it hums with what it suppresses. Here, abstraction is not an escape but a problem that persists, insists. The strip frames, extended and sprawling, no longer tentative, suggest duration, not as narrative but as accumulation. Decisions appear inevitable yet arbitrary; gestures feel both habitual and estranged from the hand that made them.

We sense a dialogue unfolding, not only between viewer and work but between materials themselves. Pleather comments on oil; oil resists pleather. One mimics, the other insists. The paintings seem to negotiate their own terms of visibility, asking: who yields more? Who accommodates whom? We feel implicated in this exchange; our looking becomes part of the work’s tension. The promise of candor, of abstraction as openness, is quietly undone. Instead we encounter something denser, more resistant. To solve the problem, we realize, would be to flatten it. And nothing here agrees to flatten.

We leave with an image that lingers: a surface that looks sealed yet breathes in small, stubborn eruptions. A skin that refuses to forget what lies beneath it. It stays with us not as clarity, but as a question that does not settle.