A note is struck; the painter stands on a stage. Rapt in concentration, his thoughts linger for a moment between the primed canvas and the music. Then Sebastian Heiner reaches for a brush. He dips it into the white bucket of paint and, with quick strokes, sketches a figure whose existence is only short-lived. Later in the process, before the eyes of those in the audience, its contours will vanish under layers of paint, covered over by strokes made with a brush or twig broom. In between, the artist even uses his arm as a painting tool or fly swatter.

What endures is communing with people born of remembrance, childhood forms, and literary or historical figures, which populate the artistic subconscious. We don’t know these people, but we are moved by the struggle they appear in, boldly painted over, destroyed, and showing through here and there. Perhaps this happens because as the artist wrestles with the visual matter he incites in viewers their own remembered encounters with individuals past and present.

Within a few minutes, Sebastain Heiner brings to the stage the same productive chaos that usually dominates his studio: enlivened battles of color to which the people in the audience are gladly eye-and-ear witnesses to, while music spurs the artist on, tames and enraptures him, and allows him to pause; while painting pushes forward in an improvised choreography. Vermillion, cadmium, and rose-madder tones slurp so sonorously from the tubes of paint that their harmony, in the plural of tube and tuba, seems as self-evident as their shared origin in the Latin word tubus (pipes), or in Wassily Kandinsky’s synchronism: «Vermillion sounds like the tuba, and a parallel can be drawn to powerful drumbeats.» (Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Bern 1952, 10th edition 1980, p. 101)

Since 2009, Sebastian Heiner occasionally leaves the private sphere of the studio and, together with musicians, proceeds to a public space. The series «Appuntamento in vier Sätzen» (Appuntamento in four movements) kicked off with the Ekles Duo in the FLUXUS+ museum in Potsdam, a rendezvous with a lab character. Especially for the painter, who normally presents only the results of his work in public: the finished painting created in the seclusion of the studio.

In the painting-music performances, the artist subjects himself to the physical-emotional excitement of the live situation. «The pressure created here forces you to give everything you’ve got every second,» says Sebastian Heiner. While the immediacy of the action intensifies sensitivity on the one hand, painting coram publico involves the risk of exposing part of one’s own vulnerability and, not least of all, the possibility of failing in public on the other.
For as opposed to the classic performance, the focus is not on the ephemeral process, but rather on the lasting image.

Unlike the painting actions of the Gutai artists and Nouveaux Réalistes of the 1950s and 1960s, Sebastian Heiner is not at all concerned with destroying traditional forms, but rather with an alchemistic process, which considers the experimental dialogue between New Music and ‘conservative’ painting, and innovatively searches the depths of possible means of expression within the medium.

Sebastian Heiner’s art evolves from a finely balanced synthesis of conscious decision-making and aleatorics. However, the color masses and crevasses of its abstract forms and structures offer no concrete support. In this sense, they reveal a certain relationship to music, which recognizes «no concrete bond,» and whose «creation and passing represent the highest form of abstraction» (Karin von Maur «Vom Klang der Bilder», Munich/London/NY 1999, S.8) for the artist. Nor do the titles offer any support. They orbit and evoke conditions, emotions and desires; they point to invisible elements and, instead of clarifying, they constantly bring up questions.

Yet the painting-music performances by no means search for answers in the dialogues of music and painting in the permeability of tone color and color combinations. The paintings illustrate musical art no more than the music merely underscores the dramaturgy of the painting process. Instead, the performances are about mutual penetration and the improvised searching of depths, in which the respective art forms surpass the intrinsic categories and boundaries.

For the artist, the spectrum of aleatoric moments expands when he notices musical tones wandering through the space, or coughing and whispering in the audience. The musicians reflect the color combination – sometimes in harmony with it, sometimes in contrast – grasping color’s materiality in counterpoint while letting themselves be inspired or challenged by cadences: by the raging (drum) beats of a twig broom or the repose of a delicate smearing gesture.

But the sound of music in the space also forms a kind of protection. For the duration of the performance, the sound waves surrounding the artist and what occurs on the canvas seem to position themselves like the ‘fourth wall,’ an invisible wall. Naturally, this is invisible because the nature of music is an immaterial one. This immaterial character is what the painter opposes the materiality of color with – sometimes even reaching the first row in the audience.

The music creates, as it were, a connection between the artists and spectators because of the shared listening experience. Watching simultaneously how a painting is created, and listening simultaneously to how musical and visual worlds communicate with one another, moves the painting-music performances into the vicinity of a synaethesic experience. One can hear art and see music.

Michaela Nolte
Berlin, September 2009