Julien Heintz

Julien Heintz's canvases attract and fascinate. Emerging from vague, crepuscular, almost menacing backgrounds, faces stand out from his darkly paletted canvases. Often mixing his own pigments with marble powder, Julien Heintz works with the materiality of the work, placing it at the service of an art that seems to come from the confines of memory.

" I'm inspired by Japanese craftsmanship. I'm fascinated by this kind 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 my pigments and grinding them. I think my approach to painting is more physical than intellectual. ".

The notion of spectrum seems essential to understanding the work of this young painter, who has just graduated from the Beaux-Arts and recently joined the pal Project gallery. The spectrum, at once an evanescent apparition, an indexical form and a link between different temporalities, invites the viewer to decode in Heintz's canvases what forms a face, whose features are both singular and universal . both singular and universal. These faces, painted in close-up, appear to be frozen in time and space. Their features seem on the verge of disappearing, absorbed by the canvas.