When, on an afternoon flight from London to Berlin, my neighbour asks me what kind of art I write about, I am pleased to have an answer prepared: “painting.” For a stranger on a plane, it’s the perfect response — quick, familiar and not completely inaccurate.

In my years of traipsing around London’s commercial galleries, I have found myself most drawn to painting. It feels like the most accessible, the most friendly medium. I can imagine how a painting was made, I see the artist’s hand in it and feel that I could get to know them through their gestures. Readymades and installations, not so much. I think of these mediums as off-puttingly cerebral, unrelatable and somehow less legible than painting.

London is an expensive city and, for commercial galleries, the high rent costs here make selling imperative. As a result, painting reigns supreme. It’s hard to say whether my preference for it is authentic or an outcome of the sales-oriented art world that surrounds me. Escaping my bubble to visit Gallery Weekend Berlin, I find myself in a scene that feels freer and more adventurous, where I quickly learn that the latter is true. It only takes three days for me to be deprogrammed.

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The following day, emboldened, I visit the mostly anonymous Constantin Thun’s solo exhibition at Sweetwater. The gallery’s windows are blocked by empty display units, and its door has a note with the exhibition’s chaste title, “April 26, 2024 – June 1, 2024”, taped to it. Inside, I’m greeted by three wooden beams lying on the floor, an unframed photograph of what looks like a landscape painting and a kitchen sink. Keil’s show might have lacked gesture, but at least it contained a degree of familiarity — I understand the significance of an episode of Naked Attraction or a prefabricated kitchen island. Here, with no context, I am left to take what I see completely at face value. It feels unfriendly, being left here to scramble for some significance in the objects on show.

It turns out that this isn’t the case. There is no one answer but a number of possible interpretations, all equally valid. Reading the exhibition’s text, an interview between Thun and writer Dominic Eichler, I see that what I took to be stingy is actually a kind of generosity. Rather than tell the viewer what they are looking at, he’d rather let them experience what comes naturally to them.

With this idea in mind, I wander around the gallery and experience a sort of hum radiating from the exhibition, impossible to put into words but unmistakable. The history of each object, though obscure to me, is somehow palpable. In the text, Thun talks about swimming in the ocean, and this is how I feel: submerged in something with vast and unknowable depths. Of course, this sensation will differ from person to person, and Thun refuses to flatten these differences. “I think people should approach things in their way,” he explains. Not so unfriendly after all.

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