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Thursday 6 February

Austyn Weiner: The Uncompromising Fury of Painting

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: I’m going to tell you about Austyn Weiner, born in 1989 in Miami, an artist who shakes the pristine walls of your galleries with her chromatic explosions and striking gestures. Here is someone who paints as if her life depends on it, as if every brushstroke is a battle against the surrounding mediocrity.

The first theme that strikes me: her physical, almost choreographic approach to painting. Weiner doesn’t just paint; she dances with her canvases. Her large formats aren’t an aesthetic choice but a vital necessity. How could she contain her overflowing energy in a postcard-sized frame? Her sweeping movements, reminiscent of the action painters of abstract expressionism, echo Pollock’s performances, but with a significant difference: where Pollock sought to erase himself behind the gesture, Weiner asserts her presence, claiming her body as the primary tool of creation. This approach resonates with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories on the phenomenology of perception, where the body is not a mere instrument but the very medium of our relationship with the world. In her Los Angeles studio, she sometimes works up to 11 hours straight, transforming the act of painting into a true physical performance. This brings to mind Simone de Beauvoir’s reflections on the body as a situation, as a means to apprehend and project oneself into the world.

Her monumental canvases are not mere surfaces to cover but battlegrounds where every square inch is contested, negotiated, conquered. She wields oil sticks like swords, brushes like a conductor’s baton. Her work perfectly embodies what Nietzsche called the “great health”, the ability to transform suffering into creative strength.

The second theme that emerges from her work is her visceral connection to her Jewish-American heritage and post-war art history. Weiner doesn’t just paint; she engages in dialogue with the ghosts of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and all the women who had to fight twice as hard to exist in a male-dominated art world. Her abstract forms and signature glyphs are not mere decorative motifs but elements of a deeply personal pictorial grammar rooted in her family and cultural history.

Her work echoes Walter Benjamin’s writings on the concept of aura and the mechanical reproduction of art. Weiner insists on the materiality of painting, on its irreducible physical presence. Her canvases cannot be reduced to JPEGs on Instagram—they demand direct confrontation, a physical engagement from the viewer. This insistence on the artwork’s physical presence recalls Roland Barthes’ theories on the “punctum”, that detail in an image that strikes and wounds us.

Her compositions sometimes seem chaotic, but this chaos is meticulously orchestrated. It’s what Theodor Adorno called “liberated form”, an organization that emerges from apparent disorganization. In Big Sister, Little Brother, she plays with family dynamics, creating palpable tension between forms that attract and repel each other on the canvas. The colors—electric yellows, blood reds, deep blues—are not chosen for harmony but for their ability to provoke and destabilize.

I can already hear the purists taking offense at her rejection of conventions, her way of blending high and low culture, her use of Bruce Springsteen’s music as inspiration. But this is precisely the strength of her work. She couldn’t care less about your categories or carefully applied labels. Her art is as hybrid as our era, as complex as contemporary identities.

Her creative process, marked by obsessive musical repetitions and constant calls to loved ones, reveals an artist for whom creation is not an isolated act but a form of ongoing dialogue. She transforms her studio into a ritual space where painting becomes a form of active meditation, a way to explore what Julia Kristeva calls the “semiotic”—that pre-linguistic dimension of experience that escapes language but finds expression in art.

In her recent series Blood on Blood, she pushes this exploration of familial bonds and intimacy even further. The embryonic forms floating in brightly colored amniotic fluids are not mere metaphors for family but attempts to map the complex emotional space of human relationships. This is what Georges Bataille might have called an “inner experience”, a dive into the depths of lived experience.

Her paintings don’t tell stories—they embody them. Each brushstroke, each drip of paint is a decision, a moment of truth. She doesn’t aim to please but to provoke a reaction, to create what Susan Sontag called an “erotics of art” rather than a hermeneutics. Her work resists easy interpretation and the univocal readings that some critics would impose.

To those who criticize her unrestrained expressiveness, I respond that this is precisely what contemporary art needs: less sterile conceptualization, more visceral engagement with the material. While our art world is often paralyzed by its own historical consciousness, Weiner dares to believe in the possibility of authentic, urgent, necessary painting.

If you don’t understand the importance of Austyn Weiner, perhaps it’s because you’re too accustomed to art that doesn’t disturb, that doesn’t challenge, that merely decorates your walls. Her work is a salutary reminder that art can still be a force for transformation, a space of absolute freedom. You’ve got it—I adore it.

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