Julien HEINTZ

Julien Heintz's canvases are attractive and fascinating. Emerging from vague, twilight, almost threatening backgrounds, faces stand out from his paintings with their dark palettes. Often mixing his own pigments with marble powder, Julien Heintz works with the materiality of the work to put it at the service of an art that seems to come from the confines of memory.

« I am inspired by Japanese craftsmanship. I am fascinated by this form of devotion to the manufacturing process. In my own work, what surrounds me is important: my space, the quality of the materials and the tools I use. I spend a lot of time choosing and grinding my pigments. I think I have a more physical than intellectual apprehension of painting ».

The notion of the spectrum seems essential to understanding the work of this young painter, a recent graduate of the Beaux-Arts. The spectrum, as both a fleeting apparition, an indexical form, and a link between different temporalities, invites the viewer to decode in Heintz's paintings what forms a face, whose features are both singular and universal. These faces, painted in close-up, appear frozen in space-time. Their features seem on the verge of disappearing, absorbed by the canvas.