Heine shines in reverse
As the title of German- born WA artist Martin Heine's latest show suggests, there is reversal at play in his paintings from the back to the front of the canvas.
Heine's method is core to his paintings' appeal. They mark the latest development of a technique honed over years.
He begins with a digital image, manipulates it, transcribes it on to a silk-screen mesh and then pushes the paint through. The results vary and range from a double reversal that approximates a polygonal digital effect, with pixel-like squares of paint generated through the grid of mesh, to a smoother, more familiar painterly surface.
Heine's colour palette is horrendously excremental on first glance, with subjects including cars, streets and bodies barely discernibly amid the muck. Closer inspection reveals a more delicate engagement with colour and paint, accompanied by the irrelevance of figuration.
An intricate palette of abstract detail makes up the surface in a complex clarity that pushes out towards the viewer as highly textural and undeniably tactile.
His subject matter is not necessarily insignificant, however. These paintings have a particular urban flavour. The grit, viscosity and depth of the paint suits the urban experience. They can be thought of as scenes viewed through mesh, like a sunlit city street through a fly-screen door, as David Bromfield describes as their source of inspiration.
The painting Urban Philosophy 11 - Inversion 243 could easily be an artistic response to the J.G. Ballard novel Crash. An image of a distorted, bent-up car is overlayed with a sketch of a copulating couple and both images are doubled in the style of Andy Warhol's Saturday Night Disaster series. Like in the novel, the painting compounds human sexuality with the thrill of the machine, speed, collision, trauma and psychological disarray.
The key to thinking about these paintings, however, is Heine's extensive engagement with experimental performance art. He is intimate with paint as a medium for performance. This is testified by one work in the exhibition, Function No.7 in three movements.
On the floor at the entry of the gallery sits a paint-splattered suitcase which is used as a projection surface. The video documents a performance at the International Triennial of Extended Media this year in Belgrade. In it Heine wears the suitcase, becoming an obscure hybrid of human and luggage.
An assistant pours paint through a funnel into the case and Heine shouts legible and illegible words through another funnel and becomes physically animated as he is coated with the cheap, local, toxic paint.
As with most of his performances, the visceral element strikes the viewer. In this instance it is the thick wetness of the paint and the thought of its contact with the skin and its inevitable intrusion into ears, nose and mouth.
Heine emerges from the suitcase looking like the surface of his paintings, very literally collapsing any distinction between his art and his body.
Such performance is washed up from the experimental arts of the 1960s and 70s where paint spills in all manner of ways beyond the canvas and the body is often brutally involved. This approach is the antithesis to conventional theatre pieces as utterly raw, unrehearsed and unpredictable.
The reversed iconography paintings are an orderly alternative to these performances, although they can easily be read as performative in and of themselves. The gesture of pushing paint cannot be separated from their materiality.
Intimacy with paint is rarely foregone in Heine's art.
Reverse Iconography is showing at Melody Smith Gallery, 69 Oats Street, Carlisle, until November 16.
