Touching Hands with Body

The Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery is pleased to present Touching Hands with Body, the fifth individual exhibition in Madrid by artist Thilo Heinzmann (1969). Since the early 1990s his work has chiefly focused on painting and more specifically on various techniques and materials exclusive to the artist himself, thereby opening the door to different types of work. On this occasion, however, the show represents a recent series of pigments on canvas.

The concept behind this exhibition is a sort of series of tension and balance, here composition and form are not to be interpreted by conventional standards but by principles where emotion and the senses prevail. One of the fundamental spects of Heinzmann’s work is the process by which he produces “…dichotomies between white and black, speed and stillness, diffusion and explosion, resolved by the painting into a trans-sensory relationship between texture and form” as Michael Bracewell states in the artist’s new catalog published by Hatje Cantz. All of these aspects are gracefully presented in the current exhibition. This being said, not everything is as it seems at first glance: black and white become a blurred spectrum of tones that drag the predominating colors towards a wide chromatic variety; unbound pigment is swiftly scattered through sliding and lashing movements over the pristine surfaces of the canvas thereby simultaneously creating suspension and movement; and the visual gives way to the tactile.

Much of the present work consists of sophisticated cosmological compositions bordering a fine line between pictorial and structural, scientific and artistic, controlled and hazardous. These pieces should be considered an exploration into the true nature and capacity of painting. The pigments delicately express attention to detail in the choice of material, its very essence and pure nature, spreading across the surfaces in varying levels of density. The heart of the explosion, that is to say the areas with a higher concentration of material and pigment, or as Bracewell calls them, the “erogenous zones”, merge at times with nearly empty spaces. It is here that the remnants of movement come to a halt, leaving a trace of what has happened. Varying levels of thickness and an infinite color palette create a silent, unseen eco which transforms into a timeless, amplified aura that floats, majestically charged with poetry. Heinzmann unmistakably uses composition and materials to achieve this as something inherent in the history of painting itself. In addition, he now converts these visual phenomena into tactile realities, where form fades into texture.

Heinzmann’s work and in particular this pigment series stray far from classical stereotypes. Throughout his career the artist has delved deep into basic fundamental aspects where the aesthetics give shape to a process that is equally conceptual. Assuming that form, color, composition, surface and texture are the primary elements of painting - incidentally all present as a fundamental part of the present work- then there is no denial that emotional and fetishist facets are direct and pure forms of expression.

The title says it all: touch, body, hands. This fascinating and seductive expression of anthropometric and sacred eroticism, through composition and materials, will inevitably take the observer on a thrill ride they are sure to remember.