John Heintzman - The Space Between Us
It is the genius of materials that ensnares the artist into complex attractions which typically result in artworks. Fold, tear, press…material gestures that shape the artist’s technique over time, seeding and reseeding the conditions of mark making that precedes language, but never form. Form, and with it, pull—a physical action that resonates throughout this work—allows my abstract language to come alive.
Thought and creativity are the manipulation of marks and lines. They do not exist apart from the results that they express. This capacity of active mark making opens the way for an infinite system of interpretation. The impulses that create the action sometimes precede the constraints of an abstract language; but they are emotional, affective, and limitless none the less. As these marks “bind,” “unbind,” and “rebind,” symbols that become the space for interpretation.
The ability to interpret language is not born out of a dual relationship between a symbol and an object: it is to interpret it. There is a need to organize what is not part of the relationship as it relates to thought. More importantly, it recognizes the distance and reflection between the definition of the line and that which assimilates language to the mind.
What stands between the unrepresentative content of an inner space and the representation of realities through perception, is a space we can learn to relate to.
In the torn paper drawings, there are nuances important to approaching the work, in part, because the essential aspect of tearing the paper to create physical lines involves meditatively engaging with the materials as they are transformed. Some activate the nonlinguistic, intuitive relationship to material—which is paper-- as it is actively, with intent, tearing through the sheet. Each work is constructed from multiple pieces of photostatic color field sheets of common bond paper assembled into a matrix which allows action to clearly draw a line.
Nearly all the materials I employ reflect or absorb light, but some do present a mirror likeness, especially in the monotypes. Each line results in metaphors for internalization, repression, and expression. These qualities of perception act as organizing elements within the work.
The viewer is traveling through a journey of dextrous mark making. Torn paper transforms visual reception into glimpses of fractured planes that are defined by abstracted fields. These forms of illegibility haunt the failures of representation which were never intended to be, suggesting only an emotional experience. - John Heintzman
My attempts are to stimulate and broaden my abstract vocabulary that engages both one’s curiosity and appreciation for the unknown. These works speak to the space that lies between the viewer and the art.