Matthias Esch: Kutlesa Projects

Kutlesa Projects is delighted to present Slice Through Reality by Berlin-based artist Matthias Esch. Bringing together works from several years, the exhibition offers a focused insight into Esch’s painterly practice, which consistently revolves around questions of control, language, perception, and systems of order.

Esch translates modes of thinking into visual structures. His paintings are composed of drawn systems, patterns, and schematic forms that appear calculated and controlled, yet are repeatedly interrupted: sliced, shifted, pierced, or broken open. These disruptions function as deliberate ruptures within otherwise ordered compositions, destabilizing both visual coherence and conceptual certainty.

A key underlying reference throughout the exhibition is the literary cut-up technique developed by Brion Gysin and popularized by William S. Burroughs. While never illustrated literally, this method informs Esch’s approach to image-making. Just as cut-up writing fractures syntax and meaning to reveal unexpected associations, Esch fractures visual systems to unsettle habitual ways of seeing and thinking. Language, structure, and perception are treated as unstable constructs rather than reliable tools.

His works are accompanied by openly subjective, often fragmentary titles that hint at sources, mental states, or conceptual tensions without resolving them. In this way, painting becomes a site where meaning is not fixed but continuously negotiated. Slice Through Reality presents painting as a means of cutting beneath surface structures—not to arrive at clarity, but to expose the fragility of the systems we rely on most, including language itself.

About the Artist

Matthias Esch (b. 1988, Andernach, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. He completed a Master of Visual Arts (Honours) at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee, Berlin, in 2017, followed by a Master of Letters at the Glasgow School of Art in 2018.

Esch’s practice is informed by a critical relationship to language, systems, and structures of order. Influenced by personal experiences with autism in his family, his work reflects a deep mistrust of verbal communication and fixed meaning, leading him toward a form of geometric abstraction charged with subjective, emotional, and romantic undertones. His paintings operate as condensed visual propositions: controlled, system-based compositions that are intentionally disrupted, punctured, or shifted.

His work engages with linguistics, counterculture, and noise music, interests that also inform his video practice, which stands in deliberate contrast to the calculated restraint of his paintings. Esch has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been featured in interviews and publications, including Soft Need 23, a publication on William S. Burroughs and his circle. His first monograph, Banality of Structure, was published in 2023. In late 2023, he presented his second institutional solo exhibition at Kunstverein Brandenburg, Potsdam.