PARIS.- Impressions, remnants, vestiges… The paintings of Julien Heintz seem to capture the faces of passersby who remain in the distance of our subconscious, like residual traits imprinted on our memory and conserved beyond our will.
Tightly cropped to contain just enough to render the defining lines of a face, his compositions hover diligently on the limit of figuration. Stretched across the canvas as if sliding across a screen, the features of Julien Heintz’s subjects are rendered in an aqueous blur, almost impossible to capture in the impetus of movement. Suspended in time and space, they exist in the confines of our collective mind, as phantasmagorical strangers whom we are drawn to, invited to pay closer attention.
For his first solo show at Mennour, Julien Heintz presents a series of new oil paintings and pastels on paper. Having constructed over several years a collection of historical documentary archives, he feeds into this carefully selected data to find the subjects of his paintings. Rather than copying a still or screenshot, he works from a moving sequence that can last for 4 to 15 seconds. The notion of moment rather than portrait seems more appropriate here, as Julien Heintz not only represents a human figure, but seeks to render an atmosphere, an all-encompassing environment subjected to the driving and tangible forces of the elements. Heavy rain, turbulent winds, scorching heat… The individuals are inscribed within an—at first glance—unknown spatial-temporal setting, a free and not fixed temporality, one that calls for an affective and sensitive response rather than a conscious and rational reading.
Julien Heintz’s titles do bring this contextual enigma to a holt by listing factual details: the subject’s function, an approximate date, sometimes a geographical location, yet never a name, age or anything with the potential for a personal connection to be drawn. We are invited to develop, through a close and somewhat tender observation, a disconcerting sentiment of proximity with a total stranger. Yet the bridge allowing for intimacy or for the possibility of attachment is lifted. Julien Heintz approaches the exercise of portraiture as an abstract color field painting, rather than a search to establish a predefined relation between subject and onlooker. His figures remain hermetic, their gaze always directed beyond the frame, off-screen, never granting access to their eyes—the famous windows to one’s soul.
Named only by their function, they come into being as part of a collective body. A supervisor at Chernobyl power plant, a Vietnamese soldier, a Russian prisoner, a German soldier in hiding are depicted with the same detachment as more common day-to-day characters, such as a performer, a woman from an advertisement or a factory worker. Reduced to their role within a given historic context—more often than not a period of turmoil—, Julien Heintz’s subjects are withheld of any interiority and inscribed within a universal narrative much larger than their individual existence. The question of agency and historical responsibility in collective bodies is underlying but never totally resolved, as the enigma lingers on, echoing the spectral appearance of the faces depicted.
Julien Heintz therefore treats time as a historical entity approached from a contemporary standpoint, but also as a process enabling him to develop an embodied relation with a wider corpus of works. His technique is slow and requires a disciplined creative cycle. A great admirer of Japanese craftmanship, Julien Heintz preps each canvas with a preliminary gesso composed of marble powder, skin glue and water (historically used to depict religious icons). Once dry, he sands it down to obtain a delicate and mineral surface, giving the painting a precious quality akin to marble. A skillful colorist, he mixes his own pigments crushed by hand that he applies in numerous layers, sometimes up to forty, in a linear and meditative movement. As he moves from prepping one canvas to applying a new layer of pigment to the next, Julien Heintz resembles a composer selecting tunes from various periods of history, gathering residues of different moments to draw a communal portrait of the continual movement of existence. Perhaps an echo to the closing statement of Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiographical study The Words: [1] “A whole man, made of all men, worth all of them, and any one of them worth him.”
— Megan Macnaughton
[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Paris, Gallimard, 1964).
