Thilo Heinzmann’s ‘Would You Take The Ball From A Little Baby’ at Bortolami Gallery

NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami Gallery presents the second solo show by Thilo Heinzmann at the gallery, on view from June 9th through August 2011. A number of works on display situate pigment powder clearly in the field of perception. Not to render the artist’s ‘material’ visible or to expose painting’s internal working principles but to generate a genuine painterly impression. The transitions between the delicate and the dense areas of colored dusting amount to transitions between lighter and darker blues, between lower and higher intensities of color. In the Western tradition of art this interest in color’s capacity for perceptual and sensory impression is inherently tied to painterly techniques. Heinzmann’s works pick up this historical thread in a non-representational way. Yet, color does not enter the space of perception as a purely optical value either – the pigment as material dust is far too prominent for such a visual dissolve. Instead, color receives a slight tactile roughening.

Heinzmann generates the unfolding of color partly through movements of distribution performed by hand and various instruments, but also through the contingent use of subtle streams of air. This treatment of color constitutes his proposal for what could become of the painterly concept that used to be known as ‘gesture’. Here it is articulated under the double terms of restriction and expanse: Heinzmann has limited the application of pigment to one single movement per canvas, whose scale he has in turn enlarged considerably. The result is an exercise in an economy of form where the vastness of the picture plane becomes the arena for the impact of an isolated color spray.

With his cotton-wool pictures Heinzmann pushes his undertaking a step further. For, also the impression evoked by these works is undeniably located within the realm of an artistic exploration of color: they clearly are monochromes – white on white. At the far end of the spectrum where tones blend into light, Heinzmann thus still explores visual nuance and coloration. The support of these artworks is lacquered wood; where traditionally would have been brush-strokes of oil or acrylic paint one now sees cotton-clouds and elaborately pulled traces of fluff; both, wood and cotton, are joined together through minutely applied traces of glue. Yet, none of these elements add up to an impression of ‘objecthood’. Instead, their materiality is pulled into the visual realm staked out by painting where the fine flosses of cotton now enact the function of facture, where the movement of the artist’s hand is transposed into the subtle lineament of adhesives, and where the hardedge wooden surface plays the role of the work’s support. In his pigment pictures, Heinzmann uses an element that in its loose form lies prior to painterly procedures. Here, he employs materials which one would classically sort into the category of sculpture, or bricolage. Both, pigment and cotton works, converge in a realm where the work engenders a process whose result in the end is painting in an emphatic sense.

Thilo Heinzmann was born in 1969, studied at Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 1992-1997. His work will be included in the upcoming group show Masterpieces of Painting in the IVAM Collection: Past, Present and Future at IVAM Institut Valencia d’Art Modern. He has shown extensively in Europe at Galerie Guido Baudach in Berlin; Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich; Carl Freedman Gallery, London; and Galeria Heinrich Erhardt, Madrid. His work has recently been acquired by the Tate Gallery Collection in the UK.