Ladies and Gentlemen,
sometimes, working up a speech in a foreign language can change one’s perspective of the object. In a way, this is comparable to the act of transplanting a painting to another place, to another country. As I was thinking about how to introduce the Berlin painter Sebastian Heiner to a London audience, a curious thing happened. I’ve known Sebastian for seven years now; I’ve followed his career and have the privelege of living with one of his works. I’ve seen his paintings in galleries, at art fairs and in private collections in Berlin and in other cities in Germany, as well as in Spain. So, it all seemed very familiar to me; his development from the figuration of his earlier works to pure abstraction, to the fusion of these two poles in his recent work.

In light of this evening, however, I soon had to acknowledge that my perception of the typical “Heiner painting” was beginning to blur. In Berlin, Sebastian prefers to receive guests when his studio is bathed in the singular light of the afternoon sun. Now, all of a sudden, I was supposed to imagine the same paintings in the London fog! Perhaps this is what has changed my perspective. The layers out of which Sebastian Heiner forms his images, the fertile strife between overlapping colours, the thick impasto rising up from the depths of the canvas, can very well be related to the veils of the fog. Both allow objects to be revealed only gradually, becoming visible only to disappear again as soon as one’s standpoint in relation to them has changed. But while the fog condenses space into a surface, the surfaces of Heiner’s paintings seem to abandon their two-dimensionality. Layer for layer, they open up a space that appears both familiar and enigmatic.

In these works, outward form is substantiated through colour, the autonomy of which Heiner transforms to attain new values and material characteristics. It is colour that lends the initially amorphic structures a bewildering presence. “The Campaign” (Feldzug) begins in the lower part of the painting with a palette dominated by dark reds, which then dissolve into a delicate wash of red-orange high up on the horizon. The colour climbs up from the roughly textured surface, warning of injury and the blood red of wounds and death, reaching a glimmering, luminous hue that seems to herald a new age. Whether it is destruction and all-consuming fire that are at work here, or the hopeful shimmer of a warm sun, is left open by the artist.

Sebastian Heiner works without concrete models or specific themes. His images emerge solely out of a subjective inspiration, and they deny a one-dimensional interpretation as much as they overcome a purely artistic self-involvement. The Expressionist Emil Nolde once described this process with the following words: “I liked to avoid all reflection beforehand, a vague concept of embers and colours was enough. The painting unfolded itself under the labour of my hands.” (Emil Nolde, Aquarelle und Graphiken, Leipzig 1995, p. 14)

With his profound sense of colour and skilled combination of compositional and aleatory elements, Heiner evokes personal as well as universal symbols. On the one hand, “The Campaign” shows a gathering on the edge of the battlefield; it alludes to wars between worldly powers as well as to profane interpersonal battles. On the other, the painting can be read as an adaptation of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt. In the foreground, we see an injured and oppressed people; in the middle, waiting groups, out of which a hand reaches, pointing to the burning bush on the horizon. In the concordat of the Old and New Testament, the burning bush symbolizes the Virgin Mary as well as Jesus Christ, who suddenly become visible in the left center area of the painting. Sebastian Heiner is not an explicitly religious painter, he follows no biblical dogma. If his paintings radiate a devotional and contemplative aura, it is because they contain the same kind of “religious feeling” and “yearning for God”(Alexej von Jawlensky, Reisen, Freunde, Wandlungen, Dortmund/Heidelberg 1998, p. 16) which the Russian painter Alexej von Jawlensky presupposed for all true art.

Unlike Jawlensky’s meditative and abstract portraits, Heiner’s figures are never more than vaguely suggested. Paintings such as “Homage” (Die Huldigung) are more intoxicated accumulations of colour than clearly identifiable contour, but as such, they reveal many-layered and multifaceted associations to the viewer. In an essay on the German Impressionist Lesser Ury, the philosopher Martin Buber wrote: “The form separates, the colour unites. Only colour can describe air and sun, fog and shadow: it tunes the individual object in to the whole, it awakens the slumbering context.” (Martin Buber, 1903, quoted in Joachim Seyppel: Lesser Ury, Berlin 1987, p. 105)

This secret, this kind of power is also underlying Sebastian Heiner’s painting. Its roots go back to an abstract tradition grounded on the threshhold from Impressionism to Expressionism. At the same time, the tectonic quality of the paintings’ surface recalls Art Brut and artists such as Jean Dubuffet or Jean Fautrier. Furthermore, the near-relief quality and the mask-like faces are reminiscent of the material works of Alberto Burri, the precursor to Arte Povera. As a doctor during the Second World War, Burri cared for the sick and wounded; later he used gauze and burlap as artistic materials in his “Sacci”. Sebastian Heiner traces such unconventional materials back to a painterly component. Elements from various art historical periods are developed into an original style which fuses “the spiritual in art”(Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Bern 1952) with a new earthly quality.

Born into an artistic family, Sebastian’s path seemed to be predestined from both his father’s and his mother’s side of the family. More than anything else, however, it was the work of the Dadaist and Surrealist Max Ernst which was responsible for his artistic initiation: since his early childhood, Ernst’s painting “Attirement of the Bride” has accompanied his dreams and fantasies. Although Heiner’s work is far removed from the pictorial language of Surrealism, in his paintings we experience a realm in which a “dream-language of encounters”(Botho Strauß, Paare. Passanten, München 1986, p. 9) is unfolded, speaking of archetypes of human existence.

Much as an actor forms the sounds of speech with his breath, Heiner spiritedly declaims the colours to archaic traces, which, in all their simplicity, are still able to touch us today. At the same time, they implicate a complexity that illuminates the passage of our thoughts away from an overly rigorous individualism and pure egocentrism. As Buber would say, they awaken the slumbering context, an almost spiritual humility. In the words of Hamlet, these images remind us to “o’erstep not the modesty of Nature.”(William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act 3, Scene 2, London 1985)

Nature and the intrinsic bond of mankind to it are the subject of paintings such as “In the Undertow” (Im Sog). A barren and mysterious landscape emerges from within the delicate modulations of blue tones. If we risk even one step into the painting, rational certainties and securities will have to be relinquished. Is it an outdoor space we are entering? Perhaps somewhere on a coast, looking out at a stormy sea? Or are we being led into an interior, pulled into a cave such as we know from the world of dreams or fairy tales? What we experience in the undertow is less the power of the actual space as it is the vision of an inner landscape. Its perspective changes from one moment to the next, falling with a lively synchronism from interior to exterior and back. This creates an agreeable sensation of vertigo, rendering the question as to where we are, the distinction between the either and the or, as imperceptible as the distinction between sky-blue or sea-blue.

Sebastian Heiner was born in Berlin in 1964, he grew up in that city and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1984 to 1991. Strangely, in the paintings of this “city child”, the city itself plays a secondary role. In some, urban noise resounds; the rhythm of the city is reflected in the vehemence of the brush-strokes or, more precisely, the strokes of palette-knives, towels and, literally, the hand of the artist. In the abstract-expressive “Tumbling Paths” or in “Airborne”, bridges cross over streets which carve through city blocks like urban canyons, recalling the cacophony of a modern partitur. At the same time, the acceleration and retardation of the staccato pushes its crusted structures onward into those layers of the earth underlying all urbanity. Here too, Heiner is alluding to a Nature that has been banned from cities.

This kind of pulsating, visual soundscape is juxtaposed by the pronounced peace and contemplation of outlying suburbs — border regions where Richard Wagners Parsifal-dictum is conjured up: “Here, time becomes space”7 In a gesture of endless and moving expansion, “The Greeting” (Die Begüßung) opens up a dimension in which man is shown in a landscape beyond time, a landscape in which he remains firmly anchored in Nature. Sebastian Heiner’s paintings, with their solemn figures and their out-of-balance gravitation, return to our field of vision what we often forget on the information highways of the global village, revising our perception of things.

Michaela Nolte, Berlin/London, December 2002
Translation: Ingrid Weyher