ALEXANDER WERTHEIM

With the new season, Alzueta Gallery Sèneca is pleased to present EmpordàPaintings, an exhibition by Alexander Wertheim produced during his residencyat the gallery’s space in La Bisbal d’Empordà. The show will be on view from September 18th to October 25th.

Wertheim’s work emerges from the tension between gesture and pattern, between intuitive freedom and pre-established order. His paintings are built upon grids of vertical and horizontal lines that, rather than imposing themselves, breathe and leave room for the unexpected. Within this structure, gesture unfolds like a human presence, fragile yet obstinate, that shakes the system and fills it with life. It is at the intersection of these two seemingly opposing elements that Wertheim locates the central point of his work. The artist seems to be searching for something between the horizontal and vertical lines, which overlap in translucent layers.
Something that, most likely, is not tangible.

“I want a broken beauty because I don’t trust harmony,” says the artist. And itis precisely within this broken beauty that he finds his place: a space of fracturewhere imbalance is not a mistake, but a vital force. Pattern and gesture coexistwithout resolution, and it is within this unresolved tension that painting remains alive.In Empordà Paintings, this dialectic acquires a new dimension: translucent colors, layered like glazes, evoke the clear Mediterranean light and the gentle rhythm of the Empordà landscape. Without ever representing it literally, the works hint at the resonance of this environment: the luminous summer air, the stillness broken by the wind, the cadence of the days. Translucency here becomes a pictorial attitude: opening the surface, allowing light, color, and gesture to circulate through it.

For Wertheim, painting is never a finished object. On the contrary, it is a surfaceunder construction, always traversed by tensions that remain unresolved. Theartist paints in series, as if each month were a container of gestures and variations, a sustained improvisation evolving at its own rhythm. Lines and colors intersect, repeat, and dissolve, like echoes of a language that never fully settles. The result is a painting that breathes within contradiction: fragile and persistent, precise and erratic, open and inexhaustible.