The work of Max Wechsler (Berlin, 1925 – Paris, 2020) rests on a fascinating paradox: to disappear in order to appear. His life traces the rhythm of this paradox. A Jewish child in interwar Berlin, he was sent alone to Paris in early 1939, after Kristallnacht. In France, survival carried its own silent fracture: his mother tongue —erased, buried, unpronounceable for years— was reduced to silence, while the new language remained foreign, almost inaudible. This confusion, this loss of meaning, would later become the matrix of his art. From that privation emerged not a rhetoric of trauma, but a poetics of subtraction: removing, veiling, eroding, until what remains —the essential— breathes on its own.