In the essence of Alfred Wais' painting lies a strong will to abstraction. He draws on representational material to express moments of experience, but does not use it in a narrative way. The curiosity for further creative possibilities led the artist continuously into new areas of painterly experience. In his still lifes, interiors, landscapes, and figurative scenes, space is created primarily from color, largely dispensing with the means of constructing perspective. A realistically fathomable light source gives way to the autonomous luminosity of the colors. If one looks at the paintings more closely, one notices how much the representational appearance is "deformed".
Vehemently Wais also works with the means of color dissonance. The color structure ranges from the almost plastically protruding, to the flatly applied stroke. Wet colors are mixed and not infrequently one finds scriptural lines and shapes carved.