To the tired old refrain of the death of painting – or, to be even more precise, of the death of gestural abstraction – it suffices to say two words: Thilo Heinzmann. If he were forced to categorize his work, one might hesitantly call him a child of abstract expressionism, but in truth, Heinzmann’s paintings don’t quite resemble anyone else’s. Rather, these frore-dyed slabs trace a processual narrative of fluidity and flux from the snowy ether that forms their foundations and through which ribbons and swathes of color smash. If the sky was white and the light composed of dark hues, these paintings could be the documentation of celestial phenomena. Alas, they leave us with no real astral or geographical plane by which to direct our thoughts, so we must construct our own centralized perspective from these surfaces of paint, pigments, and tiny shards of glass.
Most of the paintings in Heinzmann’s recent exhibition “Playing Slowies” (all works 2022) are large, even monumental, reaching beyond the body. All are titled TOFor TitleOr Untitled. This conscious play on the absence of words perhaps further accentuates the ontological nature of his enterprise. In any case, no title is necessary; language, with all its insufficiencies, always gets involved. In each piece, white is the predominant color and the unbound pigment used by Heinzmann gives the painting a rough texture when viewed up close. A kind of undercoat is often apparent. In one specimen, I detected the lightest shades of blue, yellow, purple and pink occasionally crossing the surface where finer shades of white had been applied. Above, often in the most central parts of the works, darker hues, merging into thicker bands, emerge: here, a deep dark purple; there, a fleshy pink that causes a feeling of injury or tumescence. Large slashes of curved lines give shape to the dominant white that otherwise threatens formlessness. In some paintings, the gestures are more frequent and more severe than in others; these compositions elicit a harsh melody rather than a soft buzz.
Some smaller works, displayed under glass – not on the wall but fixed on metal supports – revealed more clearly how all the paintings were made. One featured more prominently the tiny, tooth-sized pieces of colored glass that, in the larger canvases, might have been mistaken from a distance for flecks of paint. The main formation of the painting was set out in glacial blues, extending horizontally in a horn-like structure, its “skull” area erected through a brighter white impasto on the canvas, then leveled with slight lacerations, as if it was made by a pencil eraser.
So much reflection, consideration and feeling go into the creation of these surfaces that the effect is close to sculpture: an imposition of form that evokes a presence to be encountered. Heinzmann’s paintings evoke the dimensions of the beyond, exposing the limits of our world and bringing to the forefront of consciousness what the poet William Bronk once considered “the world and the worldless” – a liberated place. the need for the location.
