One thing at a time. But before I begin to write about Heiner Blumenthal’s pictures, I ought to mention that they are very big – and light. They even look light, because they are not totally covered in paint, let alone a ground, but bear just lines and structures in limited colours, sometimes only in black. As far as transport and installation are concerned, they are pictures – canvas, frames and so on. But seeing them on the wall, one does wonder whether they really are pictures, given their lack of ground and colour. On the one hand, there is the panel painting in its nakedness; on the other, those lines and bundles of lines in their heterogeneity. Not painted pictures, but frameworks and signs assembled on the raw material of the picture. “Scenario” or’,’field of action” is how one might describe the painted parts if that didn’t immediately renrind one of war reporting. So maybe it would be better to think in terms of “situations”.                                                                           So Blumenthal’s sign constructs are far from being paintings. Yet they would be inconceivable outside the pictures. The canvasses are designated as pictures. The detail is invested with its own logic because it undermines the composition. Illusionism is evoked, yet quite willingly diverts its power of persuasion onto the abstract surface. As if the situational moment were appointing itself to be the picture. “The detours of technology, the linearity of the mind” is how Moholy-Nagy described such artistic incidents. But now we must get to the point, and discuss what is in the actual pictures (the exhibited ones) – if I view the enormous pictures as a kind of comic. I can see scaffolding, constructions, aerials, tentacles and struts. Are we supposed to feel as if we are caught inside huge space laboratories or in a microcosmic chain of molecules? Or should we stay put within the artistic environment of El Lissitzky’s “prouns”? You can never be sure with all these floating “architectons”. With protean energy, they first appear as giant Mondrianesque lattices, then as constructional slogans. Since they keep shifting between a static and a dynamic method, they can never be pinned down as enlarged quotations.                                                                                                                                      What one finally sees is a criss-cross of lines – rather like chinoiserie and trellising – which in the eyes of the dazzled art historian suggest the crossed swords of the Meissen porcelain emblem.                                                                                                                         Heiner Blumenthal’s way of counteracting the threat of an aesthetically teasing or exalted construct has recently been to introduce scattered blotches which imbue the constructive genre with a certain blurredness, or just simply with life. The result is an org

anic but dangerous balance. For what previously had had the appearance of a framework, now undergoes a metamorphosis into a compactable concertina barrier. However, what looks amorphous switches over to a subversive “basso continuo”. Let’s stop looking for more certainty. The feeling of “entering” already contains all that’s important.                              Veit Loers (Kassel., 19.2.1991)

Installation views

Space Spy

Construction and Dissolution

Cologne based painter Heiner Blumenthal will show his recent paintings and works on paper

at RAUMX  from 15th until 23rd of May.

Private View Thursday 14th of May

from 6.00pm

Open Saturday – Sundays 2 – 6pm

and by appointment – T 020 7267 6267

Lines and surfaces, like racks in flat space. These are constructions, whose purpose lies in themselves alone. But with the exacting necessity of architectural plans. The paintings immediately become part of the room and the wall they hang on. In a way, as if they had always been there, or as if they had been made for the room. They behave like silhouettes or shadows in the room. They have no system and no order underlying them. There are no preliminary models, no studies. Rather, they are themselves studies for possibilities of paintings. This fact of being possible, of balancing out, always remains inherent to them, even when they have been completed as paintings.

The painted lines, spots, runs, edges, the bleeding of the paint, binding agents and painting means come about slowly, abruptly, over highly differing periods of time. Corrections, places that had first been taped, and places that have been painted over are visible. The colors slowly emerge from the lines. Earlier on, these were always very restrained, but in the meantime they are clearer and in terms of color, more defined as individual surfaces. The lines and surfaces end at the edge of the painting, or extend beyond it. The edge becomes the painting border only after it has been stretched over the frame. The surfaces hang in the rack or extend the lines to the painting’s edge.

The complete origin of the painting and all of its material are visible. Everything is immediate and direct. What is not visible is the trace of the painter. No self-expression. No expressivity. It is rather a mechanics of feeling. The paintings are about control and loss of control.

Ultimately the paintings look as though precisely this one could only look like this. As though it is a necessity. And as though as a contradiction of itself, it still bears all its inherent possibilities. The painting is a possible and necessary design at the same time.

Stefan Baumkötter

facebook

www.heinerblumenthal.de