upfront, wild and unchained

Thilo Heinzmann’s signature ‘pigment paintings’ – abstract compositions of
divergent and overlapping tangential calligraphic marks augmented with bursts of
pure pigment exploding across the surface – are all both unique and part of a greater
ongoing conversation. When the artist himself speaks, his observations and ideas
tumble over each other in quick succession, just like his ebullient and enticing work.
Heinzmann is a passionate cultural enthusiast with eclectic interests, including
serious music and odd pockets of art history. It is the artist’s generous curiosity which
enlivens and propels the interconnectedness, the vectors, tangents and sense of spacetime
travel in his haptic work. His thought-life and art-making are all part of a
continuous, open-ended flow. A flow of consciousness that leaves seductive marks
and traces.
‘Upfront, wild and unchained’ (2024), his latest and second major solo
exhibition in Seoul, comprises eleven recent untitled abstract pigment paintings. One
pair (both O.T., 2023) are both three-metre-wide panoramic compositions which
feature a palette moving from mauve to pinks, and blues to moments of emerald. In
these visually dramatic paintings, lines and forms traverse or progress, even dance,
rhythmically across the pictorial plane with abandon. Heinzmann’s pigment paintings
emerge from a process which, on one hand, he predetermines and calibrates, but
which also sets free energy and chance encounters beyond his control. The
emergence of each composition on a wet surface thus becomes revelatory, harnessing
the power of the ‘deliberate accident’ and intuition based on honed experience turned
to decisive action. The results are indeed, upfront, wild and unchained, as too are the
effects on our imaginations.
The artist’s works have an intense corporeal immediacy that sets daydreams
loose.They appear as if made in a moment of exuberance a second ago, but then
continue to form, rotate, drift, and float in perpetuity in the mind’s eye. The pigment
paintings are like mind maps. Their networks of forms also suggest firing synapses.
They appear to speak expansively to interiority. For the artist, various groups of the
pigment paintings have different conceptual starting points, for example, aerial urban
topographies or complex personal relationships. The artist, however, invites us to
freely interpret what we see, hence the lack of descriptive or sign-post titles. After all,
abstraction is not a painting of something. It is something. Heinzmann knows to paint
in this manner is to set things in motion without controlling the ultimate destination.
Abstraction is perhaps the only form which might not limit the art and life dialogue
the artist is having with himself, everyone around him, and the world.
The articulated surfaces of the pigment paintings exhibit a precision,
confidence and utter nakedness. ‘You see everything’ the artist has noted. It is no
surprise, then, that he first explored the techniques involved as far back as in 1994,
and has been perfecting them ever since. Back then, it was in part the conceptually
minded painter’s response to the game changing arrival of PCs in the art academy. It
would not be until 2008 and later, however, that the pigment paintings assumed their
full, albeit non-exclusive, place in Heinzmann’s oeuvre. Today, the artist still first
prepares the ground of his new paintings by disrupting the binary code of the linen
weave with the random texture of micro peaks and troughs resulting from a rolled
painted ground.
Over many years, Heinzmann has collected hundreds of different types of
pigment from around the globe. He makes the work in an outdoor garden courtyard
off his studio, in part by exposing vibrant pollen-like pigments to the elements. The
wind helps and the resultant delicate pigment flares on the paintings seem somehow
reproductive, life-affirming, like the scattering of visual seeds or spores. The wet
surfaces are also subjected to various mark-producing physical operations with the
help of two trusted assistants – both painters, who have worked with Heinzmann for
more than a decade. ‘Over the years, we’ve developed a silent language, a way of
communicating, which enables me to paint in the way I do,’ the artist noted in a
recent interview. He is naturally secretive about his exact methods.
The story of Western abstraction, we now understand, has many more twists
and turns, origin stories, strange rooms, renegade practitioners and weird resonances
than once asserted in the standard canon. It is a cultural site both under ongoing
construction and archaeological investigation. Important to Heinzmann’s work’s
implicit contextual background are Modernist developments specific to post-WWII
Germany. Art had a crucial role amidst the rumble and, in the wake of the utter moral
collapse resulting from fascism, set incongruously against the ‘economic miracle’
that followed. (A divided Germany’s art dialogue thus was quite distinct from that
across the pond in the US, and different again to abstraction in South Korea, for
instance.) In West Germany, for the then emergent generation, vanguard forms of
abstraction played a key role in reckoning with the recent past, and the making of a
reparatory break without forgetting. Heinzmann mentioned to me, for instance, of our
father’s generation of artists, such as Karl Otto Götz (1914–2017), originator of the
paint scraping technique and professor of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, as well
as figures like painter Hans Hartung (1904–1989). Given today’s pluralistic
postmodern approach to contemporary art, the mid-20th century primacy of abstract
painting and the intensity of the surrounding debates last century seems hard to
reanimate. Even theoretical pronouncements of the demise of the Königsdisziplin,
seem now somewhat remote, and clearly premature. Firmly in the now, Heinzmann’s
work speaks to abstraction’s enduring strengths: its raw threshold assertion of the
art’s place in the world, its capacity to convey through materiality and presence
across generations, and to speak specifically to generalities. In doing so, it is not to
reconstruct an uncritical universalism, but to proffer that which we share in the
imminent intersubjective present.
—Dominic Eichler