Hours Without Edges

Things are never just things. They retain the traces of touch, point to past actions and carry stories that extend beyond their function. Arthur Palhano's paintings are rooted in such objects: gloves, knives, shoes, tree trunks, keys and locks, as well as flea-market finds, recur throughout his work. Although drawn from his everyday surroundings, these objects are detached from their original context through the act of painting and never appear as mere representations. The artist develops his paintings through a continual process of applying, scraping away and revealing layers of paint. Each layer preserves traces of the one beneath it; each gesture leaves behind its own resonance. Painting emerges here not as a surface but as a sediment, in which time and material are inseparably bound together. What becomes visible is always also shaped by what remains partially concealed. The subjects of his paintings emerge from an ongoing dialogue between observationand lived experience. Brazil and Berlin – where he spent time during an artist residency – meet not so much as geographical locations but as overlapping spaces of experience. His recurring motifs resemble entries in a visual diary whose meaning is never fully fixed, remaining open to others and their subjective responses. It is precisely through their specificity that they acquire an unexpected universality: a glove points to an absent hand, a knife to care and vulnerability, a found object to the unseen stories of its previous owners. The title of his first exhibition at Meyer Riegger, _Hours Without Edges_, describes a state in which time dissolves its fixed contours. Past, present and the imagined coexist without being clearly distinguishable from one another. This sense of dissolved temporality runs throughout Palhano's work. Memories do not appear as self-contained events but as something that persists in objects, gestures and materials, continually renewed through the act of painting. In this suspended state between personal memory and collective experience, the boundaries between object and subject also begin to shift. Things no longer confront the viewer as passive objects but instead assume a distinctive presence of their own. Arthur Palhano's new works not only speak of memory; they allow it to be experienced as something unfolding in the present.