Edge of Appearing – A New Voice Takes Shape

Johannes Seluga

Info: The paintings of Johannes Seluga occupy a space that belongs to a slightly different temporality. Figures emerge like apparitions, surfacing from a depth that is at once personal, primordial, and collective. For Seluga, painting is a form of excavation: a slow, layered unearthing of forms that lie dormant within him, awaiting the winter months in which he isolates and allows the unconscious to rise with greater clarity. From this layered working, the figures surface. They feel like travellers from an ambiguous time, always on the threshold of entering or leaving the world. Faces appear and recede, caught between clarity and erasure; identities dissolve into roles or archetypal residues. Even his titles—Der Schüler, Der Tierbändiger, Jäger und Gejagter—speak of the human as mask, myth, or function. In Carl Jung’s sense of the persona as the mask through which the self negotiates the world, these figures read less as subjects than as distilled positions; roles that expose the psychic scaffolding beneath identity. Seluga’s technical vocabulary mirrors this instability. He works with a great variety of techniques; combinations he likens to the permutations of a lock. Through this patient process of recombination, the possibilities for the image remain open, shifting, unresolved. His practice sits within a lineage that touches the atmospheric gravitas of German Romanticism, and the primordial figuration of Dubuffet, yet he folds these influences into a vocabulary unmistakably his own.