SETAREH is delighted to announce Amidst the Fog, the first solo exhibition in London by Berlin-based artist Johannes Seluga (b. 1998, Worms). His paintings 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.

What defines Seluga’s practice is the way he paints toward the figure rather than from it. Forms accrue, erode, and return through a process that feels as much psychological as it is material. He approaches the canvas without a plan or reference, letting each work develop its own internal logic, its own weather. 

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 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. Moreover, for Seluga, these beings often act as guiding spirits, primordial presences that have accompanied him since childhood, figures that contemporary life teaches us to disregard. They are not portraits but thresholds: points where the visible meets the unconscious, where internal life briefly gathers into form, crystallisations of a deeper, collective memory.

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.