ENTRACTE

Pioneer of the ceramics’ rebirth in contemporary art, Johan Creten is back with his exhibition named Entracte, his fourth solo show at the Parisian gallery. This exhibition can be considered as a symbolic pause. It’s an invitation to reflection and a way to take a deep breath. With Entracte the artist underlines the importance of beauty in his work, while reaffirming his humanist consciousness and the social and politi-cal resonance of his practice. This exhibition is built as a dialogue with I Peccati, his monographic exhibition at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, from 15 October to 31 January 2021.

“You have already held a fish, haven’t you? It’s slippery. At once pleas-ant and rather disgusting. Contrary to what one might think, it’s not the humidity that makes our phalanges slither on the scales, but a viscous secretion produced by the animal itself. This substance has a protective function and many virtues. The mucus acts as a wall against parasites, bacteria and certain heavy metals. It limits external aggressions. Depending on the species, it enables the fish to swim faster, like a per-formance catalyst. Lastly, it ensures the fish’s relative survival outside its natural environment. Its slimy texture lubricates the fleshy walls, like any living organism whose membranes, which cover the cavities that are open towards outside, are called mucous membranes precisely. They are precious interfaces that connect the interior to the exterior, and this is what gives them an extreme sensibility.

This is Johan Creten’s fourth solo exhibition at Perrotin Paris. Everything shines here. Depending on the finish of the pieces, this shininess is more or less offensive, from the clarity of a patina to the stark brightness of an enamel. In the main room, several ensembles collectively form a panorama that calls to mind a marine world. Algae and shells remain identifiable motifs, swelling the iconography in the room through their graphic nature and their manner.

Several emerging Venuses are spiked with still humid petals. Their finery seems to consist of a density of tonic lips fixed in the impermeability of the glaze. One can smell the tide. The feminine contours take shape in series such as Odore Di Femmina and La Perle Noire, and of course The Herring, which surveys this drenched landscape in a god-like manner.The fascinating mood exuded by various glands thus wraps the body in a film that equips it with a transparent armor. Today the properties of this gelatin have drawn the interest of the scientific community, who see in the exceptional mucus a promising material that might revolutionize industry, especially the textile industry. Still underwater, the excretions of some specimens are composed of fibers whose quality may resemble the most delicate of silks. Thus, in its adult state, the hagfish, a kind of sea serpent that has haunted the abyss with its digestive tract since the dawn of time, is said to produce up to a million kilometers of this thread that is a hundred times thinner than a single hair. What a verti-go-inducing resource. This potential passementerie remains a defen-sive system of fatal efficiency for this type of eel. Once expelled, their mucus can occupy up to several hundred times its initial volume, instantly suffocating any predator, whose gills it causes to explode.

Johan Creten constantly stimulates the temptation to touch. A primor-dial taboo in many religions, including the religion of art, contact feeds the swelling of desire, making the other senses seem like preliminaries with regard to the fulfilment it demands. The ultimate taboo often claims to preserve the status of untouchable works in contrast to the vulgarity of objects that can be grasped and handled. To caress a bronze, to touch a ceramic are acts of transgression. There is the dual risk of hurt-ing oneself and of damaging the artefact. Here the artist even goes so far as to make us sit on the works. With his new series of Boulders, seven possible seats each possess a deadly sin. The installation devel-ops a certain symmetry with its Italian counterpart on display at the Villa Medici in Rome, to which an important monograph is devoted, ostensi-bly entitled I Peccati. Set up in the expectation of a catch, the situation recalls the stimulating articulation between pécheur (sinner) and pêcheur (fisherman).

Halieutics, the science of fishing, aims for a sensible management of aquatic ecosystems. It intervenes in the agronomy of the liquid bio-sphere. It also intervenes in research and informs scientists in their experiments in zootechnics. But for the moment, the creature with the miraculous mucus has resisted domestication and has failed to repro-duce in captivity. It thus refuses to see its invaginations exploited for the benefit of fashion corporations. And it is satisfied with its existence as a monster of the deep – a scavenger at that. Because it is indeed necro-phagous and has a habit of making its way into the remains to devour them from within. It cultivates in its own way a passion for the carcass, a tradition of the grotesque, that imperative hollow of cast iron or terra-cotta. Wrapped in its cloak of mucus, it remains ungraspable. Having said this, as any fish farmer will tell you, it is best to hold a fish with wet hands. It will be a little less slippery. It is therefore covered in drops of water that the surfaces touch. One generally takes part in such an inti-mate act in order to eviscerate. The swollen belly is then sliced cleanly, spilling its shimmering viscera.

Johan Creten opens up his shapes and their connotations enough not to freeze them in a single reading. The interpretations must remain mal-leable, from humor to disgust. He himself feeds off this ongoing quest for an image to gorge on. The series entitled Glory testifies in particular to this act of evasion. Its golden luster prevents the gaze from anchor-ing itself, its luminous intensity making us skid on the reliefs. A certain dynamism operates through motion and light, affirming the kinetic com-ponent of these modules. Theirs is a penetrating perspective. It draws us into a hypnotic vortex which inhales, which exhales. The rays expand towards the baroque splendors erected to exalt the sacred, all the while contracting to pierce the most secret depths of human morphology. In the distance lies this original black hole, a gap. Let’s call it Vulva. And since everything has always passed through a slit, that is precisely where the artist wants us to begin.”

Joël Riff

Photo : ODORE DI FEMMINA – SOLFATARA, 2019. Glazed stoneware. Sculpture : 39 3/8 × 20 1/2 × 18 1/8 inch | Sculpture : 100 × 52 × 46 cm. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin

The exhibition that Pieter Vermeersch has created for Perrotin Paris – his sixth solo exhibition for this gallery, the third in Paris – will not, it is to be feared, reassure those who are worried about his art in general and his conception of painting in particular. Worrying, indeed, because without equivalent – but with enough historical reference points to give our X-rays something to work on.

Vermeersch’s artwork feeds on all the antagonisms of the discipline, seeking, for example, to be both figurative (it always has a photographic source, and these photographs are always made by Vermeersch, even when they are what he calls “accidental”) and abstract (because these “accidental” photographs often only have to offer a few informal color variations). Even when the canvas is “abstract,” it is paradoxically fabri-cated as a photorealistic painting, the photographic image being repro-duced in it through a meticulous system of grids. Of the canvas, it sometimes only retains the format, leading it towards other media: in the Paris exhibition, the first room includes silkscreen prints on marble and the last room displays a set of oil paintings on fossilized wood – a wood that, as Vermeersch puts it, time has “mineralized.” In the marble silkscreen prints, “matter becomes image” in favor of an “industrializa-tion of pointillism.”

Vermeersch’s art is neither illustrative nor narrative: in short, art is its only crutch. His process often starts from the materials – for example, images of marble are silkscreened onto the marble and the image is enlarged to such an extent that each grid dot shows the support around it – and from the virtues and personal stories that the artist projects onto them. The works, and even more so the exhibitions, translate into a physical experience Vermeersch’s scientific and poetic reflections – reflections which focus on time and space. This is not a program that the viewer should decipher or identify traces of in the works and exhibi-tions (the works are not the literal translation of a thought) but, say, the source from which they flow. Without ever renouncing oil painting on canvas, the artist’s constant experimentation with new techniques (here, silkscreen printing on marble) and new materials (fossilized wood) charges the work with diversity and complexity.

The moment of the exhibition, for Pieter Vermeersch, is truly a moment of crystallization that goes beyond the presentation of the works. More precisely, his exhibitions are ingenious systems – of perception, reflec-tion, apprehension – which put into practice in a more literal way the divisions of time and space. The “room divider”, work of Pieter Vermeersch and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, that contradicts the first room – made of slats (mirror on one side, image on the back) and shaped like a comma – punctuates the movement of the spectator, “slows down” the visit, poeticizes the space and multiplies the possibilities of framing the gaze. The paintings and the space of the room are reflected in this mirrored curve, and the white cube is shattered – Vermeersch shapes the context in such a way that, according to his beautiful formula, it is less a question of seeing the works than of discovering them. In doing so, he also takes a step in the direction that is opposed to the “civilization of access” that characterizes the contemporary age.

The ingenious moment of the exhibition is also when the wall works are temporarily confronted with the materials and colors of this “room divider”: in the Paris exhibition, the polycarbonate and the mirror, indus-trial products, stage the marble and wood in a conflicting manner. Sim-ilarly, the works themselves expose conflicts between the industrial and the natural, for example, through the application of the chemical com-ponents of screen-printing ink on raw marble. Conflictual or as “beauti-ful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella?” The system that makes up Vermeersch’s exhibition organizes the viewer’s experience of these conflicts in a way that also keeps logic at bay.

Eric Troncy

Photo : Untitled, 2020. Silkscreen on marble, 57 x 43.5 x 2 cm | 22 7/16 x 17 1/8 x 0 13/16 inch, 13.00 kg. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin

CREATURE COMFORTS

“April is the cruelest month…,” announced T.S. Eliot in his post-Spanish flu poem, The Waste Land (1922); Virginia Woolf sent her influenza survivor protagonist, Clarissa, to buy the flowers herself in Mrs. Dallo-way (1925). During the same pandemic, Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch reached the canvas to depict their auto-portraits, tinted by uncertainty, paranoia, and malady.

Perrotin welcomes visitors to Creature Comforts, the gallery’s fifth exhi-bition with American painter Hernan Bas, featuring thirteen new paint-ings the artist has created since March at his Miami studio. A sense of poetic tension prevails the works Bas painted in various scales that range from larger-than-life to intimate, reflecting the broad palette of sentiments experienced by his paintings’ protagonists. A signature in the artist’s unabashedly gilded universe, a suit of young adult men pop-ulate borderline surreal mises en scène with angst remnant from teen-age years and fragility towards the impending manhood. Equally persistent and delicate, blasé twinks gingerly execute flamboyant acts—they flirt with danger, waltz with death, and huddle with pain. Their aloof expressions contradict with the ardor they deliver within each scenario that maneuvers between absurd and perilous. Overall, they challenge our oh-so relished quarantine comforts, ornately tran-scended in Bas’s brushstrokes from mundane to baroque.

Elegance and demise are balanced in Dinner hour at the Little Shop of Horrors, in which a boy’s green gloves grasp a metal chain elevating an animal carcass inside a nursery for carnivorous plants. He satisfies the demurely barbarian plants’ hunger for flesh, not with the enormous slab of meat, but with flies tempted by the smell of the raw cut, depicted here à la Chaim Soutine. In Hot Seat, stakes for risk are high, as well as the length of a serpent draping from the ceiling and nestle around a boy’s neck. A scarlet shade of red washes the room where a terrarium with a host of reptiles occupies the background. A scorching lamp and the boy’s matching-colored shirt complete the inferno Bas illuminates with inspiration from Munch’s Self-Portrait in Hell (1903). Sanguine hues echo in Three Vampires and Nectar (or the hummingbird enthusi-ast), evidently in A+ type blood two boys preserve in medical bags to nourish their pet bat in the former, yet deceptively in the latter. Here, nectar-filled bottles suspend from the branches of a lush tree, perched by a jubilant youngster also feeding his pet avian, a purple-headed hummingbird. A young gentleman seeks shelter behind a sheer veil in How Best to Suffer Swamp Life at Dusk, masking his blue eyes under a ghostly net shrouding over an umbrella against greedy mosquitos. Sheer yet resilient, the veil is already dotted with bugs unable to devour the boy for his blood. Similar to the exhibition’s other subjects, the boy is positioned between discomfort and posture, willfully assuming a pre-carious position in a duello with natural critters.

After nearly two decades since Bas started painting them, the boys—modern day Ganymede’s, Tadzio’s and Elio’s—signal passage into maturity, reflected in their selfless and fatally generous gestures. These young men embrace risks at the expense of their beauty, which has been both their armor and ornament. Once indulgent aesthetes and wistful romantics, they, now, sacrifice their vital fluids or forego their dwellings in attempts to accommodate comforts of creatures they dar-ingly hold dear. In Adult Security Blanket, one fashions his all-black attire with a royal blue blanket, emblazoned with: “Adult security blan-ket. If lost return to D. Bell,” based on a thrift store find in Bas’s collec-tion for over a decade. The box of the original blanket, which is not depicted in the painting, reads: “When all seems to fail, try this ‘true companion’ for comforting consolation…”

Osman Can Yerebakan

New York, September, 2020

Photo : How Best to Suffer Swamp Life at Dusk, 2020. 274,3 × 213, 4 cm | 9 × 7 ft. ©Silvia Ros. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

This personal exhibition reveals a previously unseen facet of the artist’s work, which tends towards minimalism. Between painting and sculpture, his referenced and spontaneous practice rests on an intuitive and dynamic exploration of form. Josh Sperling usually decides on the use of colour at the last moment, after the production of the works he ‘composes’, in his own terms. In the process of refining their fabrication and installation, he skilfully deploys his technique and opens himself up to new possibilities.

In a first room, five circular groups respond to each other with their own logic and alternately involve familiar motifs featuring a variety of a priori dissonant colours. These five tondi are the result of Josh Sperling’s recent experiments. The juxtaposition of different canvases, followed by the shifting and multiplication of these surfaces, aims to create systematic volumes

The execution of this gesture can be observed in this monumental series in which these large formats display rings, interlacings and spirals generated by this action of an almost sculptural nature.

The all-over monochrome is then used for the first time by the artist to activate the squiggle motif. This ‘squiggle’ evokes the game of the same name invented by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Following a multicoloured mise en scène at the Perrotin Tokyo, it is presented here entirely in black, giving rhythm to each of the walls. It helps to immerse the spectator in an almost psychedelic momentum. These squiggles bring to mind the heightened contours and vivid forms of the graphic design that was all the rage in the 1980s. An era when technological innovations were accelerating and spreading through the creative sector and society as a whole. They also evoke the symbols of an ancient language, such as that of the Iroquois, from which Oneonta, the name of the artist’s hometown at the foot of the Catskill Mountains, allegedly comes, and which is now a locus for the hippie community.

Born in 1984 in Oneonta, New York, Josh Sperling was influenced by geometric abstraction and American minimal painting of the 1960s and 1970s with the discovery of leading figures such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, but also pop culture. The artist merges these influences into combinations of shapes and colours in a spirit of collage. The artist also draws inspiration from historical movements such as Googie, an architecture commonly referred to as atomic, which emerged in parallel with the conquest of space and is specific to the signage of California’s shops and highway services in the 1950s. Also attracted by visual references related to postmodernism, like the zigzags of the Memphis movement, taken up by MTV’s famous chameleon logos during the 1990s, the artist’s imagery is both composite and personal.

Trained in cabinetmaking and then graphic design, Josh Sperling finally became interested in design for its formal character and the impact of its aesthetics on visual culture. The digital interface, the frame and the canvas constitute the bulk of the tools that define his work method that involves both conception and creation.

His paintings are first drawn on a computer before becoming canvases stretched to the utmost, but not on three-dimensional frames. This formalism also underlines the artist’s insatiable curiosity, both for mathematics and high-quality craftsmanship as for the architecture and design archives available online.

If the process by which Josh Sperling imagines and assembles these image-objects is thus calibrated, their presentation has until now been the result of a random approach. The artist here takes advantage of the exhibition space of Perrotin in an open reflection between the culture in which the image is embedded and the space-time in which the object is embedded. The light-hearted chromatic synthesis of his compositions is nowadays combined with a lyrical sensitivity and a tangible fullness in an age devoted entirely to the digital world and where utopian desires are a thing of the past.Josh Sperling lives and works in Ithaca, New York.

“Without Park Seo-Bo (b. 1931), there is no western painting in Korea.” As such, Park was a pioneer of the avant-garde in the 50s, a leader in the development of Abstract Expressionism in the 60s and since the 70s has been hailed as the “Master of Dansaekwha,” a Korean art movement which is gaining global attention.

Color(色). Park Seo-Bo held a solo-exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul) and is now expecting his second invitational exhibition at Perrotin Gallery, Paris. The exhibition will introduce ‘Late Ecriture(描法)’ also known as ‘Color Ecriture(色彩描法)’ whose work begins with an encounter with autumn foliage. In 2000 when Park held an exhibition in Japan, the colourful maple leaves at their peak experienced by the artist in the Fukushima Mountain, covered and painted the artist’s creative soul with ‘colors.’ Unable to ascertain the color as yellow- even when looking at an artwork with a yellow tone- during the first exhibition at Perrotin1, when asked what color it was, Park replied, it is “yellowish forsythia color”. When asked again, “are you saying it is yellow?”, he repeatedly said, “no, it is yellowish forsythia color.” ‘Forsythia color’ may include yellow but also all other hues like the spring sunlight shining down on forsythia, shadows of birds flying over or rain drops falling pitter-patter on the petals. From reddish ‘ripe persimmon color’ to blueish ‘air color’ with a greyish background exuding a handful of fresh clean air…each and every work is based on the artist’s hands-on experience, capturing different colors that just cannot be defined as one.

Emptiness (空). Park pastes three layers of hanji or Korean traditional paper amply soaked in water onto the canvas, and when it is moist and damp enough, creates lines or surfaces using a thick pencil, just like farmer ploughing his land. Once the form is complete and the moisture is completely gone, Park adds colors (water colors) embodying the natural landscape and tastes he experienced. In the process, Park makes an unlimited repetition of scraping out, carving colors(色) with emptiness(空). The word emptiness in the oriental world is not exactly ‘nothing(無)’ that is given nor ‘void(虚)’ that surges up unexpectedly. The state of ‘pure emptying’ reached by ‘cultivating one’s mind and body’ by repeatedly scraping out thousands and tens and thousands of times is what we call emptiness. Attaining this ‘emptiness’ is also impossible. Park Seo-Bo says that “just like in a modernist painting, an artist filling up the screen with his or her thoughts and presenting them to the viewers is a form of violence. Painting is not about pouring oneself out but conversely emptying oneself.” That is why he stressed that the “future role of art is to allow visitors to go inside that empty space and make them feel comfortable.” In that emptied space, the audience can be either seized by a 42.4°C heated passion or -23.9°C uncontrollable shiver of abstract criticism depending on the inspirations delivered by art.

‘Myobeob or line drawing in oriental painting(描法)’and ‘Ecriture’. The relationship between ‘colors’ and ‘emptiness’ facilitates our understanding as to how the title of the myobeob(描法) series in Korean came to be translated as ‘Ecriture(描法)’ in western language. In 1967, Park named a technique of repeatedly drawing the lines at regular lengths with a pencil before the paint on the oil pigments of the canvass coagulate as <myobeob(描法)>. With time, the lines drawn or written in the ‘Early Ecriture” developed into ‘Colors’ in ‘Late Ecriture’ and the ‘act of emptying oneself in the ‘Early Ecriture’ further develops into ‘letting oneself go’ or ‘healing’ in ‘Late Ecriture.’ When translating the word ‘myobeob’ with more than 2000 years of history in Korea alone2, the artist opted for ‘Ecriture’ of Roland Barthes, rather than going for ‘graphein’ with long history (which has the meaning of ‘ecrire’ and ‘peindre’ like ‘myobeob’ but not the meaning of ‘stroking with a brush’3), or archi-ecriture of Jacques Derrida or other similar words. To Barthes, ‘Ecriture’ is a non-authoritative, individual and creative writing, and in particular “Writing Degree Zero” means ‘neutral writing’ or ‘white-colored writing’, meaning a pure innocent writing without any bias or judgment om the writer. Despite such differences, the most striking similarity between Roland Barthes’ “Writing Degree Zero” and Park Seo-Bo’s <Ecriture> is that both empty out knowledge rather than filling in knowledge while writing. Visitors/viewers while freely roaming around in this space emptied out by the artist will be able to reveal and unlock their unique colors.

SIM Eunlog, Park Seo-Bo, Writing Colors(色) Over Emptiness(空)

Gabriel de la Mora’s serial work constitutes a structure of mirror images, echoes and repetitions. Insofar as previous series like Inscripciones sonoras sobre tela (bocinas) [Acoustic Inscriptions on Fabric (Speakers)], El peso del pensamiento (suelas de zapato) [The Weight of Thought (Shoe Soles)], CaCO3 (cascarón de huevo) [CaCO3 (Eggshell)], and Neornithes (plumas) [Neornithes (Feathers)] shift from objects to monochromes and then to graphic inscriptions or images, his exploration of materials and their energetic and/or symbolic charges has set up a constructivist aesthetics that puts unseen presences and patterns into circulation. Reprising the aesthetic sense of the term “echo” from Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, in which the philosopher analyzes “generality as generality of the particular and repetition as universality of the singular,” Gabriel de la Mora charts a movement toward the relationship between the serialization of the monochrome in relation to the particularity of materials and a phantasmagoria of echoing forms, sounds and gestural inscriptions. The selection of works included in this show presents diagrams of mirrored diptychs or monochromatic sequences in which the circle as a found phenomenon becomes a leitmotiv, whether as a paradoxical repetition of the particular with a universal pretension, or as a generality of the particular.

A constant feature of De la Mora’s practice is his use of specific objects and readymades in monochromatic organizations that strike up dialogues with the history of modern painting, conceptual art and the minimalism of the 1960s. The chain of symbolic linkages, arranged by opposition or complementarity, between inscriptions that visualize sound, fragments of eggshell, and the movements impressed on the worn-out sole of a shoe act like musical scores for variations on similar forms that are expressed paradoxically in difference. Such a repetition of combinations unleashes sequences of resonances, a sort of amorphous continuum that moves from one physical medium to another, from a series of found and manipulated objects to other surfaces, whether these be the fabric of an old speaker on which sounds reproduce an indexical form, or guineafowl feathers that express circular patterns while simultaneously making it possible to speculate about the relationship between genetic determinants and the conditions under which species evolve. The conjunction of these series through a relation of resemblance ultimately expresses an invariant in Gabriel de la Mora’s work: the singular appearance of the unseen.

This phenomenology of hidden presences and phenomena reflects a paradox in which the invisible is revealed in the singular; that is, in repetition and difference against universal generality. In artistic terms, this aesthetics gives way to an analytic approach that examines the modern constructivist tradition and minimalist literality, inverting their premises to produce a model of visualization in which the monochrome reveals latencies and images of the invisible that could indeed be echoes of a deeper vibration, a repetition within the singularity that animates it.

With this selection of four series of works that dialogue with the long constructivist tradition of the monochrome, Gabriel de la Mora forays into the aesthetic experience of repetition and difference, monochrome and image, object and visual sound. All repetition is experienced not in equivalence but in difference, as for example the act of assembling a homogeneous surface using fragments of eggshell, in a destruction whose fragmentary condition reflects the paradox of the unrepeatable repetition; that is, the systematic elaboration of a geometrical and monochromatic form, apparently universal and yet unique, auratic. Gabriel de la Mora’s neoconstructivist aesthetics tends to rehabilitate the metaphysical notion of constant transformation. Under this philosophical umbrella, the only eternal is the continuous flow of the world, in an amorphous chain of echoes in resonance. These premises also «echo» in Deleuze’s argument that repetition “puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and artistic reality.”2 A circle cannot be seen as a general, but only as a particular. Just like an echo, difference enables resemblance —but in variation, never as a substitute or a law. For the same reason, rather than a system of general equivalences of the form quid pro quo, the exchanges in repetition underwrite an organic system of differences between particulars. A symbol of something particular, the impression on the sole of a shoe or a piece of fabric, can never be replaced by something else. An echo is therefore a relation of resonances or repetitions but not substitutions: a chain of singularities, mirror images and resemblances without equivalence. The echo is a singularity, the ghost of a sound, or in visual terms the image of an object. According to Deleuze, “If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence.”3 A repetitious resource in the history of art, the monochrome becomes an expression of the insistent pretension to universality, an eternity without permanence, particulars whose repetition in the history of art becomes an echo. It is, then, a ghostly repetition of difference, a monochrome turned into an image, the estrangement that is produced when a universal becomes particular.The works of Gabriel de la Mora reinscribe the passage of time in a stunning image, a latency that poses for the instant when a totality appears outside in its attempt at permanence, a concatenation of echoes on a continuum of repetitions in permanent difference

“The paintings of Thilo Heinzmann are at once intuitive and absorbed in the tightness of aesthetic constraint: at once romantic and attuned to modern industrialism, engineering and manufacture. From such hybridization of intent derives their strange ecstasy and their moments of sensory epiphany – a point at which the eroticism of aesthetic science becomes stripped down and chemical: volatility stilled.” (Michael Bracewell, 2013)

His works with pigment, for example, display that powdery dust, they exhibit it in its material concreteness, as one of the many specimens of matter that make up our world; but they also transform it into chromatic fields, exploring its wide yet subtle palette, letting color perform as it should after it has been freed of the burdens of representation

In each series, a finely calibrated series of decisions assembles a language that is both experimental and contained. Interest lies precisely in the terrain between control and accident, pre-given parameters and chance. Their urgency, meanwhile, comes from an enquiry that is metaphysical at root. The works describe a translation of thought through materials that develops incrementally, stage by stage, from one body of work to the next. Heinzmann’s works are analytical, but theirs is a hermetic questioning that concerns itself with intrinsic formal issues: this is not a “networked” painting. He approaches these issues with the eye and the heart of a connoisseur, working towards an understanding of the universal that is formulated in the studio-laboratory, detached from particulars of time and place, as well as extrinsic social, political or economic issues.”(Kirsty Bell, May 2019

With his new group of paintings on display here, and specially conceived for Paris, Heinzmann brings into play the broad spectrum of possibilities that evolve from this field. Ranging from tender, subtle tones to deep, almost epic extravaganza, each new work suggests an approach to the present moment, as well as it constitutes the desire that conditions painting.