Thilo HEINZMANN - Artist - Perrotin

To the tired old refrain of the death of painting—or, to get even more specific, the death of gestural abstraction—one need only utter two words: Thilo Heinzmann. If forced to categorize his work, one might hesitantly call it a child of Abstract Expressionism, but in truth Heinzmann’s canvases don’t really look like anyone else’s. Rather, these slabs of frore complexion trace a processual narrative of fluidity and flux out of the snowish ether that forms their foundations and through which ribbons and reams of color break. Were the sky white, and light composed of darkish hues, these paintings might be the documentation of celestial phenomena. Alas, they leave us without any real astral or geographical plane by which to orient our musings, so we must construct our own centralized perspective out of these surfaces of paint, pigment, and tiny shards of glass.

Most of the paintings in Heinzmann’s recent exhibition “Playing Slowies” (all works 2022) are large, even monumental, overtaking the body. All are titled O.T., for Ohne Titel, or Untitled. This self-conscious play on wordlessness further accentuates, perhaps, the ontological nature of his enterprise. In any case, no titles are needed; language, with all its inadequacies, always interferes. In each piece, white is the predominant colour, and the unbound pigment Heinzmann uses gives the paint a rugged texture when viewed up close. Some sort of underpainting is often apparent. In one specimen, I detected shades of the lightest blue, yellow, purple, and pink occasionally breaking through the surface, where thinner shades of white had been applied. On top, often in the centermost parts of the works, darker hues, coalescing into thicker swaths, emerge: here, deep dark purple; there, a fleshy pink that elicits a sense of wounding or tumescence. Great slashes of curvaceous lines give shape to the overarching white that otherwise threatens formlessness. In some canvases, the gestures are more frequent and more severe than in others; these compositions elicit a harsh melody rather than a soft hum.

Some smaller works, displayed behind glass—not on the wall but affixed to metal stands—more clearly revealed how all the paintings were made. One showcased more profusely the tiny tooth-size morsels of colored glass that, in the larger canvases, one might have mistaken from a certain distance for splotches of paint. The painting’s main formation was enunciated in glacial blues, stretching horizontally into a hornlike structure, its “cranium” area erected through a brighter white impastoed onto the canvas, then leveled down with slight lacerations, as if made by a pencil eraser.

So much thought, consideration, and feeling goes into the creation of these surfaces that the effect approaches the sculptural: an imposition of form that conjures a presence to be encountered. Heinzmann’s paintings hint at dimensions of the otherworldly, exposing the limitations of our world and bringing to the cusp of consciousness what poet William Bronk once deemed “the world and the worldless”—place unburdened by the necessity of location.

Consisting of five new works made of resin on roughly cut and shaped sections of chipboard, Thilo Heinzmann’s surreally titled exhibition Pantaloni is stark, confrontational and compelling. Displayed across three rooms, the works (all 2019) are serially titled ‘MM’ and numbered 01–05. Four are fastened at a slight angle to the gallery wall by means of metal plates FIG.1 – industrial-looking devices, which, while barely visible to the viewer, push the works slightly forward and contribute to their formidable sense of weight and presence.

MM 01 FIG.2 comprises three overlapping sections of chipboard, with a semi-circular hole hewn out of the right-hand side of the middle section. The largest work, MM 02 FIG.3, is in two separate parts, one made up of two overlapping planes of chipboard, and another, hung a little way to the right of it, acts as satellite to it. MM 04 FIG.4 and MM 03 FIG.5 are both made of single pieces of chipboard. The former is portrait format and the latter sharply indented with crude triangular cuts along its lower edge. MM 05 FIG.6 stands on the floor, leaning against the wall and divided on the left-hand side to just above its centre by a narrowly tapering triangular cut.

Thanks to its uniformity in terms of materials and technique, the series has a singular mood that is at once inscrutable and imposing. The works face the viewer as though utterly, gloriously, indifferent to either scrutiny or critique. At the same time, they explore aesthetics and the act of painting with extraordinary and curious intensity.

All the sections of sand-coloured chipboard – an inexpensive product used in building and DIY – are violently hewn, cut or broken, and crudely angled, the raw edges revealing a biscuit-like interior of condensed wood debris. These shapes define the picture plane of each painting, upon which are pools, drips, trails and smears of colourless resin. Embedded in the resin are scatterings of the small wood fragments out of which chipboard is manufactured.

The experience of materiality that is fundamental to these works – and indeed to all Heinzmann’s work – is in this case refined to a pun on media: as chipboard itself is industrially produced from wood chippings and sawdust bound with resin, so MM 01–05 are hand-crafted extrusions of the same process, the raw elements attacked, separated and exploded into a form of industrial and semi-sculptural abstract expressionism.

The longer the viewer studies these works, the more they insinuate a mood of absurdist anarchy – of slapstick almost, that their otherwise uncompromising brutalism simultaneously seems to deny. Within the cold austerity and confrontational energy of these excursions into the act of painting there is a tension between fervid, impulsive gestural extravagance and a fetish-like attention to form.

The viewer is drawn into a synaesthetic relationship with the work, wherein the visual is experienced in terms of the tactile. The painterly and sculptural qualities of MM 01–05 acquire an array of sensory meanings – of smoothness or coarseness, of ‘brokenness’, glossiness, transparency, saturation and volume. The art of Heinzmann makes eloquent a dialogue between materiality and the capacities of painting that extends the monumental sensory-aesthetic statements made by Robert Rauschenberg’s work of the 1950s, into the colder and more elusive sensibilities of the twenty-first century.

Since the mid-1990s Heinzmann has made paintings out of media that include Styrofoam, glass, animal hide, hessian, cotton wool, aluminum, unbound pigment, crystal, fur, gum and wood. A common denominator of these paintings is the severe contrast of materials (shards of coloured glass in Styrofoam, for instance), which invokes a tactile response simultaneously with a visual reaction. The viewer is compelled to imagine the experience of touching the material elements of the work, exactly as they might be driven to seek a point of optical focus when looking at a work by Bridget Riley.

As the optical-sensory power of Riley’s paintings derives from their rigorous interrogation, restraint and control of formal qualities – line, shape, colour, rhythm, tone, movement – so that of Thilo Heinzmann, while equally fixated on formalism, manifests as instinctual, primal yet unexpectedly exquisite. It is the fetishist’s attention to detail, whereby sensation is conjured in a manner both direct and elaborately contrived.

The series introduces a new toughness into Heinzmann’s work which distances their temper from the primarily sensual aesthetic of some of his earlier paintings. The gauzy drifting spread and ghostly broken grids of pigment across a pristine white ground that typified Heinzmann’s works from the late 2000s – each painting then sealed within a Perspex box –possess an irresistible minimalist allure. Likewise, the slippery licks, hangs and folds of animal hide in works from the mid-2000s, or the brisk sweeps and dabs of reversed matt and gloss blackness of the ‘Tacmos’ paintings of 2012, appear tentative in comparison to the assurance and aesthetic force of these chipboard and resin paintings.

With their smashed and torn-out forms, punkish inscrutability and dark spit and piss-like splashes of resin, MM 01–05 convey an immediacy and physicality that surely derives from a hard-won mastery of form and process. The development of Heinzmann’s work over the last twenty-five years conflates the aesthetic and formalistic rigour of American Minimalism and gestural abstract painting with the anarchic and libertarian desire to disrupt artistic complacencies that emerged in German art during the late twentieth century. 

As such, the odd audacious gravitas of MM 01–05 exemplifies a divide in contemporary painting that asserts two contrasting yet equally valid sensibilities or schools. The first of these might be termed ‘lateral’, and describes work that is usually representational or narrative, is concerned with psychological mystery, derives from craft-intensive atelier skills yet embraces trans-media forms, and is above all more concerned with atmosphere than aesthetics. The second, of which Heinzmann’s exploration of materiality and gesture is a product, could be labelled ‘empirical’ or ‘heuristic’ and tends more towards abstraction. It is fixated on the cumulative development and understanding of form and formalism within one medium, is process intensive (as opposed to craft intensive) and measures its progress or ‘success’ in sensory-experiential terms.

The works in Pantaloni arrest the viewer’s gaze and demand the act of looking and seeing to equal the act of painting. As such MM 01–05 can be seen as an intervention that defines a position. Their balance of aesthetic longing and formalistic violence would collapse into bombast were it not for their concision and strangely emotional intensity. They hold the gaze in a manner akin to a crime scene, as though the material and psychic residue of an unknown event, a catharsis or revelation, had been frozen in time. Heinzmann’s art, as it relates the act of painting to materiality and formalism, asserts a commitment to classicism as much as to enquiry.

The viewer’s first experience is of a chalk-white picture plane, which is almost square. This white background has a quality that is inscrutable, modern, and impassive; above all, it appears to yield up its texture to the possibility of imprint and disturbance. In this it possesses a certain tension—as though its slightly rough, matte surface is both taut and absorbent. Visually, this presents a quality that makes the picture plane neither the host nor the agent of meaning.

Rather, one might think of this dense white surface as providing one half of an aesthetic formula that resolves a tension of opposites—achieving a meticulous balance of pictorial, conceptual, and sensory qualities. For reacting upon, within, and against the flat matte white of the plane is a dramatically diffusing burst of black pigment—a supernova of exploding darkness that manifests as if literally suspended within the instant of its cataclysmic release.

The epicenter of this “explosion” of pigment appears to lie just slightly to the left of the center of the picture plane, and to be raised a few degrees toward the upper left corner of the painting. The sensory and emotional effect is immediate and visceral, engaging the viewer’s gaze in the manner of both dramatic spectacle and visual analysis. Firstly, one is aware of what might be termed “points of detonation” within the flaring shards of blackness. These are those points where the pigment is in dense, concentrate clusters, which are then separated by more gaseous-looking areas of grayness, strafed with darker blurs and spots of black, and attended within their hinterland by miniaturized reprises of the central darkness.

In terms of patterning and motion, one might liken the dynamism and seemingly arrested velocity of the burst of black pigment to an image within astronomical photography. But as one looks more closely, and allows what might be termed the “gravitational field” of the painting to exert its own rearrangements of sense and space, so a fundamental mysteriousness reasserts itself. For the visual effect of the detonation of black pigment is sensed by the viewer in a manner that is at once visual and tactile; the dichotomies between white and black, speed and stillness, diffusion and explosion, are resolved by the painting into a trans-sensory relationship between texture and form. Pictorial no less than compositional qualities—in terms of media, aesthetics, and what once was critically revered as the “integrity of the picture plane”—are transposed into a simultaneity of sensory impressions: stark, auto-generative, minimal, yet also filled with drama, emotion, and a near scientific sense of wonder.

Such could be a viewer’s first impression of a painting made by Thilo Heinzmann in 2012 (O.T. [Untitled], like the majority of his works). In the purity of its binary elements (black and white, flatness and velocity) this painting might also be seen to summarize Heinzmann’s founding interest in the balancing of figuration and abstraction—in making these two seemingly opposing qualities synonymous with one another.

The art of Thilo Heinzmann, since his earliest works from the mid-nineteen-nineties, might therefore be seen as a pioneering exploration of the nature and capacities of painting. In this, Heinzmann has made a body of work that can seen as both singular and collective, making successive developments in concept and process, the progression of which is cumulative within the sensibility of his artistic concerns.

Over nearly two decades, therefore, Heinzmann has examined in interrelating series of paintings those qualities seen as fundamental to the activity and art of painting: form, color, composition, light, surface, texture, scale. It seems as though his art makes a primary engagement with what might be termed the “primal” conditions of painting. As such, the art of Thilo Heinzmann can also be seen to engage with notions of aesthetic and conceptual fetishism—developing a visual language which makes eloquent the beguiling tension and resolution between sensory and visual phenomena.

An early work, Malerei (Painting, 1994) goes some way to establishing the terrain of Heinzmann’s enquiries. The viewer sees a landscape-format section of pressboard (or “woodchip”), the edges of which are rough, as though torn and apparently weathered—as if the pressboard had become soft and mulch-like, and then re-constituted and re-hardened. Within this ambiguous and semi-industrial picture plane, there are defined areas of flat white paint, in varying gradations of thickness. In the lower half, the lighter density of whiteness allows the darkness of the pressboard to show through. In the upper section, the whiteness is thicker and more resolved. The painted area is ranged slightly to the left, leaving a margin of raw pressboard, ragged-edged and distressed toward its lower righthand corner.

This margin appears to intensify the inscrutability and ambiguity of the white painted area. The painting seems to play with the apparent impossibility of being simultaneously resolved and left in mid-process. As such, the viewer’s experience of the painted surface and the surface texture of the rough-edged pressboard is placed into a new alignment: there is an actual dialogue between “background” and the painted surface, which in turn redetermines the aesthetic status of the painting. Smoothness and roughness become as visually codependent as “whiteness” and “rawness”—the viewer’s awareness of the act of painting, as much as the materials and processes of painting, becomes as it were anonymously heightened.

A slightly later painting, Sitzende Frau (Seated Woman, 1995, p. 8) appears to extend the conceptual and aesthetic territory opened up by Malerei. In this later work, the “background” of the portrait format of painting is a rich, vivid, and egg-yolk yellow—seemingly applied in forceful vertical strokes, and with varying densities of color. Orange and gold suffuse certain sections, and in the upper left-hand quadrant a reddish gash can be seen that is echoed in a softer, broader, and slightly elongated form toward the lower left. This is flanked by descending hemispherical sections of orange/yellow, which after the punctuation of a forceful downward vertical give way to a roughly square-like section of blue-green, on the upperpart of which sits a square of diaphanous black fabric. This same fabric is used to create the central “pictorial” element: two horizontals and a vertical above them, on the right-hand side. The right-hand edge of the picture plane is indented, leaving a strip of whiteness.

Sitzende Frau becomes more complex, visually, as the viewer attempts to find a point from which to take their bearings. The relationship between the forceful, flame-like color and the “cut-out” elements of semitranslucent black fabric tends to sharpen the viewer’s visual sense, alerting a sensory “second-sight” to the experience of the painting. Heinzmann’s concern, conceptually and aesthetically, appears to be with the capacities of aesthetic sensation that derive from the “stuff” of the painting process. The roles of texture and gesture become fetish-like—engaging with an eroticism that derives from the coupling and abutting of materials, their “erogenous zone” located within the grain and consistency of the edges and meetings of materials, and their heightened and exposed rawness.

Once again, these concerns and qualities appear to be cumulatively developed by Heinzmann in the subsequent progression of his art. Having established a deeply felt concern with texture and pictorial presence—and the relationship between figuration and abstraction as repositioned through the dialogue between materials, composition, and aesthetic sensation— Heinzmann then refines these questioning statements into a more concentrated form.

A series of works made in the year 2000 in the media of pigment and epoxy resin on styrofoam, each framed behind a plexiglass cover, can be seen to both consolidate and advance the progress of Heinzmann’s art to date. In black, red, and a cool, peppermint green (for example) these paintings—their materiality, effect, and presence both protected and amplified by the box-like plexiglass cover—sharpen the interactions between their media. It is almost as if the resin were bleeding and pooling from elongated vertical and horizontal lacerations, or acid cuts, within and across the picture plane. This produces an effect that might be likened to classic abstraction (echoes of the art of Paul Klee); and yet the foregrounding of texture, process, and substance, enabling self-generative effusions and reactions of effect, imbues the paintings with an immaculate balance of delicacy and volatility. Their presence is at once elemental and chemical, raw and committed to visual and sensory fetishism.

The art of Thilo Heinzmann enables an empowering confluence of ideas and art-making processes. At their center would seem to be the paradoxical fusion of aesthetic density (in terms of texture, color, and materials) and a form of covert Minimalism—covert inasmuch as the reduction and refinement of the artistic process, to recognizably minimalist pronouncement, is held in aesthetic reserve to such qualities as primal gesture, tactility, and the conflation of opposing qualities. Heinzmann’s relationship to Minimalism, therefore, can be seen as more of a consequence of his art-making processes and conceptualism, rather than their point of departure or intention. The minimalism of process serves to heighten Heinzmann’s celebratory and at times irreverent engagement with painting.

There is without doubt a conceptual and aesthetic playfulness to Heinzmann’s art, in which the act of painting can take a variety of increasingly audacious media and processes. His interest with material is extended to include animal hide, mosaic, plaster, gum, peacock feathers, mineral, fur, wood, tin, hessian, cotton wool, and crystal—a bewitching lexicon of media that might, on the one hand, be said to denote archetypical qualities (a periodic table of symbolism) but yet which are deployed by Heinzmann in juxtapositions, patterns, and constellations that appear simultaneously random (consequent on a single gesture) and highly refined.

In his Pigment Paintings the diffusion of pigment lends a poetical and richly atmospheric air—an intimation of weightlessness and drift that is matched by the pictorial declaration of parity between material texture and composition. Nuggets and fragments of white cotton wool on a white background (from a series made in 2011–12) may well indicate a near Zen-like approach to process, to both Minimalism and the classically Surrealist fascination with the eroticism and fetish-like nature of texture and surface.

The art of Thilo Heinzmann is empowered by its constant evasion of set aesthetic criteria. In this, the “primal” nature of the work reasserts itself, rather as though Heinzmann’s sensibility as an artist were closer to that of pre-Christian and “tribal” art-making, in which the exploration of a form and medium is devoted to achieving direct forms of expression, unconcerned with canonical values.

This is a position consolidated by Heinzmann’s recent Tacmo series of paintings, in which the pristine black surface of the picture plane—at once seemingly taut and yielding—is disturbed by a sequence of deft gestures that leave a “gloss” trail or imprint: black on black. These paintings likewise evade assimilation into a reductively art-historical appreciation of the “black painting”; rather, they possess a tension of opposing qualities (stillness and movement, surface and gesture) that enhance their negotiation of form, and their determined correlation of sense and sensation.

As such, Heinzmann’s art can be seen as fixated on simultaneity: on the synchronized enshrinement and deconstruction of painting itself, its materials, grammar, and language. Enmeshed within this simultaneity is a primal joyousness, denying philosophical pessimism and asserting a sensory and intellectual immersion in the possibilities of painting as an act. In this, the art of Thilo Heinzmann is filled with restless enquiry as much as meditational stillness—catching process and transfiguration in their moments of realization, at once immediate and suspended in time.

Painting has always been situated between two senses. Although it is obviously made for the sense of sight, it also addresses the sense of touch, albeit less directly so. Touch figures in the physical contact by which paint is applied to the picture’s planar support—a moment in which the painterly image is generated in the first place; touch also factors into painting through the potentially tangible material of the finished pictorial surface; or it could be drawn in when a painting depicts objects in space, making them seem as if they were bodies that could be touched. There has always been a haptic quality to the painted image, mediated by the eye. In this manner, painting means interweaving sight and touch, and out of this weave, it invents a multiplicity of possible forms, impressions, and aesthetic values. Indeed, one might also say that not even the concept of pictorial composition is limited to the interplay of visual elements but rather encompasses inherently tactile aspects.

Painting with Crystal and Fur

Thilo Heinzmann’s works unfold a painterly program, even where they display concrete material objects. This means that although the surfaces of his pictures may hold, for instance, a crystal, an ammonite, a piece of fur, a peacock feather, or cotton fuzz, these things do not belong in the field of “assemblages,” contrary to a categorization demanded by arthistorically trained reflexes. One may be lead to think that the aim here is to transform the space of painting into another, actually spatially extended dimension: what was once the planar site of visual representation—the canvas—would now figure as a spatially concrete, physical entity upon which material objects are placed. This would (re)define the space of art as a zone in which observers, in their bodiliness, encounter objects. “Art” would consist in negotiating the meetings that take place in this type of space. In fact, however, Heinzmann is concerned with something else. Even when he works with apparently non-painterly materials and techniques, he still pursues a painterly aesthetic.

Let us look at one of the paintings in which fur meets crystal (D.C.I.B.I.T., p.89).The precise, sharply cut edges of an animal skin are placed so that the texture of the hair is visually emphasized. The black, brown, and white coloring forms a flaming pattern that combines a slightly curved lineature with a smoky visual progression from light to dark. The crystal—an amethyst, in this case—provides a similar play of color in purple hues. Zones of various degrees of transparency and fogginess flow into each other. The irregular, prismatic shape of the stone runs from the outside edges toward the translucent interior in fractured veins of gentle furrows and fissures.

Heinzmann’s works make all of these features perceivable, which is to say that he does not treat the surface of the painting as a panel, upon which found objects are simply displayed. Rather, things are arranged here in such a manner that their structures, grains, and coloring become visible. They are offered as visual opportunities, made accessible to the eye; indeed, they are tapped into as sources from which springs a nuanced interplay of optical characteristics. This is a direct link to the pictorial tradition of painting. For one of painting’s most important objectives since the Renaissance has been to open the view onto the world and its things. Or to put it differently: to turn the things that already exist in this world into objects for beholding.

One could also say that the crystal and the fur are visually acknowledged. The medium used to communicate these visual values is classic enough: painting. This also means that abstraction and representation enter into a particular relationship here. First of all, Heinzmann’s works are of course determined by the historical caesura that allowed modernist art to temporarily suspend painting’s representational program. In Heinzmann’s work, this impulse toward abstraction extends to things themselves. That is, the crystal is not here to be seen as the object “crystal,” or the fur is not here to be seen as the object “fur,” but to be regarded as the source of a wealth of visual impressions. In this movement, however, the abstracting approach also leads back to the history of painting as an art of representation. Even seventeenth-century still life painters, for instance, had to abstract from the objects they were observing in order to reduce them to two-dimensional impressions. In Heinzmann’s work, the thing itself becomes the object of this painterly, representational impulse. Precisely because the crystal is undeniably on top of the panel, while also being suspended in its state as a thing, its optical qualities are set free: its color gradient, the refraction of light to which it gives rise, the various degrees of transparency it contains, and so on. Liberated from the state of objecthood, the effect of the material qualities is, in turn, inseparable from modernism’s attempts at nonrepresentational abstraction, according to which these values are meant to matter as such. In the present case, painting is representational, or more precisely, it puts things in front of the eye, and yet it is simultaneously abstract and abstracting. Furthermore, it does not derive its quality solely from the fact that it allows both elements to exist side by side, but also because one element determines the other.(1)

Marble: Depicting the Visual Plane

Painting here, therefore, is a double operation: it depicts the wealth of things that populate the world while simultaneously subtracting their objectness. It is concrete and abstract. Painting renders a visual surplus, while it quite practically takes the crystal, the fur, the feather, and the ammonite, as well as the colorful building block or the fossil, and removes them from the hand that might have touched these things in everyday life, picked them up, carried them from here to there, or weighed them. The visual benefit gained by Heinzmann’s works, therefore, coincides with a shift that moves things just beyond the horizon of tangibility, so that they just peek out over to the side on which we might have been able to touch them. Being able to see more means removing something from the area in which it can be accessed by hand.

This painterly interplay of representation and withdrawal is especially visible in the marble mosaics. They completely cover the surface of the painting’s support in closely laid fragments. This simultaneously doubles the surface and visually elevates it a few centimeters to a slightly higher altitude—the subtle over-and-under weave of the canvas would lie just a little bit deeper. Now, its irregular forms reveal the interplay of uneven structures, and also a limited, internally differentiated palette of gray, white, and brown hues, which also includes the shimmering, embedded particles of the stone. It is possible to discover here an echo of the color of naked canvas. Encrusted, as it were, in marble, as if it had been covered by geological or architectonic activity, the image of a canvas is evoked on the surface made of stone.(2) The representational and demonstrative function of painting has asserted itself here and claimed the marble as its own element by making it emulate its own regular support—the textile foundation. The place that is thus made accessible unites characteristics of two apparently irreconcilable positions. On the one hand, this work method is linked to the history of painting, as a shrouding and at the same time revealing veil through which the pictorial representational function of the work of art is figured.(3) On the other hand, the pattern of intersecting lines resulting from the system of furrows in between the fragments of marble refers to that classic modernist project that has been described as the negation of just this kind of representationalism. The grid—the orthogonal, optical woven pattern—has been understood as a type of optical and semiotic recourse to the material base of painting.(4) One is painting as something that represents and depicts the world; the other is a self-referential and recursive art that primarily points to its own conditions. Both varieties are present in the marble mosaics. And here is stone—a material that is difficult to surpass in terms of weight, solidity, and haptic concreteness—set up in such a way that—in addition to its obvious materiality (perhaps one sees a geological cross-section of layers of sediment, a wall, or even a paved ground here)—it begins to invent visual fictions, in this way displaying the image of a canvas. Two diametrically opposed kinds of material—marble and fabric— are blended into each other in the realm of the visible.

The Aggregates of Pigment: Color

In the case of the Pigment Paintings, the process of setting visual and material values next to each other takes on a special quality. First of all, pigment does not figure here as the “material” of painting that would be exhibited in order to make the effects of this art form become transparent toward the conditions and processes of its own making. The pigment is also employed without being subjected to any representational function or to the forces of a binding agent. The way in which it is used on Heinzmann’s canvases creates, in turn, a genuinely painterly effect. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain the progression from a more delicate to a denser spread, and thus from a lighter to a darker and more intensive blue, red, green, or black. In Western art, this interest in the impact of color and its sensory qualities is inseparable from painterly technique. Heinzmann’s works stand in this tradition, even though they do not preoccupy themselves with questions of how to describe objects and bodies through tracing their outlines or through planar projection. Nowhere does the powder condense into the cloudiest of representations, yet color is also not perceived as a purely optical, intrinsic value—the pigment is too prominent for that. Instead, color is roughened up, as it were, by the pigment.

Furthermore, one can compare the contrast between the coarse, grainy spots and the colored mist, or the fog of spreading hues, on the one hand, with the white surface that is devoid of any sort of canvas texture and characterized by a regular unevenness, on the other. In this juxtaposition, the interplay between various types of painterly faktura is deployed, but with a slight shift. (5) Thus, the work and its impact are set in motion through an element—pigment powder—whose lack of aggregation and non-submission to binding forces would usually put it in a place that precedes the work process. This also opens up new ways to mix the colors, which are not first dissolved in a chemical medium and then presented to the eye as a compact visual tone that can in turn be mixed with other hues. Instead, “mixing” here signifies a relationship that takes place directly within the eye as an optical combination, resulting from an interplay of the pigment’s material qualities and its application to the structured surface. This creates mono- or polychromatic effects that include the transitions between various degrees of color, as well as the inherent transition the paint makes, from a material carrier to an optical value. Meaning: color is present here as both hue and material.

Procedures that resemble these explorations of new color spectra can be observed in the Styrofoam and (some) of the Hessian Paintings, as well as in the Porcelain Paintings. However, Heinzmann proceeds with these materials in the exact opposite way. Here, the paint does not appear in a powdery, dustlike consistency; rather, the pigment is mixed with resin. The resulting variously colored liquids are then poured on so that they form intersecting traces. Some of these trajectories of paint are of a homogenous tone, while others display hardened streams of various degrees of color, lying side by side. The expression “application of paint” only does insufficient justice to the result, because it presupposes a stable support, a surface, onto which a colored substance is added. But here the structural fields thus created—which seem to oscillate between brushstroke and pure flow of color—are sometimes absorbed by the canvas, while other times they remain distinctly above that ground, creating reflective surfaces
of deceptive moistness and liquidity. Sunk into the pores of the fabric and then gleaming on top of it, almost like puddles, the colors play around their usual baseline, the horizon of the painting’s surface. Deeper and flatter than usual, duller and wetter, they complement the work of the Pigment Paintings. While the Pigment Paintings allow the graininess of the colors to fan out in a kind of Northern Lights spectra, these latter examples go off on a search for the multifaceted quality that is inherent in paint as a fluid medium. Finally, in the case of the Porcelain Paintings, the color white appears in various states of glaze (iridescent) or non-glaze (matte), scattered across the irregular mini-peaks and valleys, the winding slopes and surfaces of the porcelain bodies, like isolated flower petals jutting out of the painting’s surface. By expanding it into actual space, the paint here is, in a certain way, exposed to a play of shadows that is not subjected to the regularizing distribution that occurs on the picture’s even plane. Thus, Heinzmann’s work unfolds different states of chromaticity in conjunction with diverse materials of different colors. Color appears in alternating aggregate states, which in turn modulate its optical effects.

Horizon of Touch

As soon as the materials have found their place on the surface of the painting, they appear on a vertical plane before the eye of the beholder, separated by the distance of the gaze. Their material qualities unfold for the eye. The powdery quality of the pigment, the hairiness of the fur, the loose density of the cotton—all of these haptic values are accessed visually.

At first sight, this type of work is based on two leading artistic values that have been in effect at least since the advent of classic modernism: texture and faktura. It is not, however, identical with either one. By the term texture one would understand the various types of marks of a given work’s surface that render its material haptic qualities, its roughness, its smoothness, its unpolished grain, to various degrees of visibility. Faktura, by contrast, would be the kind of marking that refers to the way the material has been worked upon, thus constituting an index of the artist as the one who has invested labor in the work’s production.6 The mode in which Heinzmann deals with surfaces and materials is related to both, but the focus is on the surface qualities of artistic materials in general: the texture of fur; the matte, iridescent, hardened surface of cooled tin that still conveys an impression of fluidity; porcelain bodies displaying various degrees of enameling that reflect or do not reflect at all; the fine weave of the canvas on which these things lie; the rough weave of the hessian, which is in turn treated in different ways, put into various states of smoothness and rigidity. This kind of “working the tangible” comprises the white foundation of the Cotton Paintings, created by reworking the surface with the smallest of peaks and valleys; it also comprises the fine little hairs that stand up on the unprocessed outer edges of the canvas; the changing powdery quality of pigment, which ranges from filmy to thick deposits; and the rough or fine grain of the styrofoam. The list goes on. The Tacmo series of works then expands this project to include the modulation of various degrees of visual dullness and reflection. On the edge of the color spectrum—black—their various structured zones unfold: the roughened surfaces and smooth spots made with different brush textures and hands—an interplay of material-optical impressions. The light-swallowing surfaces are contrasted with curves and paths that shimmer silkily with light. Involving both texture and faktura, Heinzmann’s work invents a multiplicity of ways that surfaces can manifest.

This whole enterprise, however, is not a purely art-historical maneuver. The impulse behind it is a different one, having far more to do with the aforementioned desire to depict the wealth of things in this world. When these are made accessible to the sense of sight, it is done in a way that makes it possible to perceive a plenitude of haptic qualities: the fine hairs that stand up on the edges of the canvases; the unraveling threads that stick out of the unhemmed edges of the hessian; the surfaces of canvases that have been roughened and then smoothed over; the double hardness with which a splash of tin is scattered on a light metal plate; the way that paint pigment settles into the smallest notches of the grounding. All of these stimulate the sense of touch. So much haptic value is generated here that it is almost impossible not to imagine actually touching it. Yet the viewers are denied this actual physical contact, which only intensifies the way they experience the horizon of these pictures in front of them. It is a horizon solely accessible through the gaze.

In this light it is now possible to once again take another look at the Tacmos. Hand and brush have left their marks on their black surfaces, through a process that is achieved by reversing the traditional manner of working. While the brush, or the hand, normally applies paint, adding layers, here they work in a subtractive, smoothening mode. Dashes, curves, straight lines of various widths and lengths are the result of the fact that the still-damp paint is worked over, that thin films are stripped away from the layers on the surface.

This creates traces of that act of touch that is of course denied the viewers. For the view opened by up Heinzmann’s paintings encompasses a territory that lies just beyond touch. The silky, matte qualities of the Tacmos, the splayed furs, the delicacy of marble dust, the smallest of crystals, the powdered pigment, and the weave of the hessian: all of this challenges the sense of touch, asking to be touched, in a way—and yet is reserved for the eye alone. It is this kind of reservation—ultimately, the reservation of painting—that makes it all the more tangibly attractive.



(1) Here, one could also mention the philosopher Edmund Husserl’s concept of the suspending power of “image consciousness” (Bildbewußtsein). According to Husserl, the optical imagination parenthesizes the weight of (object-related) reality. One might say that the visual abundance of the real in its entire plenitude only emerges in parallel to this type of suspension; see Edmund Husserl, Phantasie und Bildbewußtsein (Hamburg, 2006). In the Western tradition, painting was, for a long time, the artistic technique whose depictions of the visible world fulfilled a comparable, objective function. Making things visible on the canvas robbed them of their real weight, but at the same time it reinforced their visual reality.

(2) Heinzmann’s treatment of the surfaces of the Tacmos, of the cotton and Pigment Paintings, makes this very canvas disappear through creating a system of small peaks and valleys in the process of applying paint.

(3) See Johannes Endres et al., eds., Ikonologie des Zwischenraums: Der Schleier als Medium und Metapher (Munich, 2005).

(4) See Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1994), pp. 8– 22.

(5) In fact, the category of faktura here signifies a subclass within the system of an overall work on surface-structure. See the section on the “Horizon of Touch.”


(6) See Benjamin Buchloh, “From Faktura to Factography,” OCTOBER 30 (Autumn 1984), pp. 82–119. See also Maria Gough, “Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (Autumn 1999), pp. 32–59.