Paul Wallach (1960, USA) began his career as an artist-in-residence with Mark di Suvero, with whom he worked in New York for three years. He then spent two years in Düsseldorf, Germany, before moving to Paris in the 1990s, where he continued to develop his highly personal conception of sculpture. From a vocabulary that was determined early on, his sculpture espouses lightness, caution in relation to monumentality, heterogeneity, a relationship with space in tension (Paul Ardenne).
While the artist’s three-dimensional constellations are born of sensitive and organic arrangements of different substances, his primary material remains wood, a raw living and sensual medium that transforms itself over time, reflecting the uncertainty, ephemerality and vulnerability of the natural state of existence. There is in his work a latent consideration of temporal processes, on temporality in general, as another plane of thought that is neither spatial nor material (Lóránd Hegyi). Since his early childhood, Paul Wallach has seen each tree as sculpture in its raw state and developed an intimate connivance with wood, which he uses in the form of strips and planks that, in an intuitive assemblage of fabric, plaster, string and, more rarely, metal, he transforms into a complex system of signs, mysterious and enigmatic fragments of a poetic truth.
In these weightless sculptures that carve air, space and time, sculptures that draw or drawings that sculpt, there emerges an intentional austerity, a revelation woven of Empty and Full.
Presence through absence.

The shadows inside the structure and projected on the wall seem to generate imaginary extensions, a kind of radiance of sculpted form (…) The aura of the hidden, of disappearance, of the invisible is conceptualized and revealed (Lóránd Hegyi).

In a noisy, diffuse era geared toward an overproduction of images and raucously glittering artifacts, I am all the more struck by the focused, silent, even ascetic, work of Paul Wallach. I admire its apparent poverty, the subtlety of its expression, and the banality of its materials pieces of wood and cloth, lengths of string, glue, and visible nails.) They have a singular way of working with each other and with the given space, its walls, air, light, emptiness…They don’t occupy it as much as they are occupied by it. They create space, making it immense, as if their presence expanded the room. I like the way their shadows, often almost white, stretch out, subtly marking a wall or the floor. (…)
His sculpture appears like a drawing in space, or perhaps more accurately , a drawing that creates, shapes, and modulates space. A drawing that generates space. The concern her is the space itself as much as the drawing that embodies it – and it’s a generous space, one that collaborates with light, as precise as it is open, a space that we’re invited to pace (the body figured within the figured sculpture) and even more, a space that we’re invited to inhabit (to stand in, within, in front of, to move though, to stop in, to look at). On the wall, other sculptures as well as tableaux, pursue the construction of place and complete the experience. The sculptures on the wall, like those that work with the void (placed out in the room), interact with both space and air,  while the tableaux,  concentrated like icons, further punctuate the space, arresting the forward motion of the body, bringing the gaze to a sharp focus. (…)
Olivier Delavallade
Excerpts from the essay En équilibre, dans le vide, in the catalogue WHERE WHAT WAS, Paul Wallach’s solo exhibition held at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne Métropole in 2014, and in 2015 at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec.