Broken Vistas

Photo: Joseph Silva,
New York City, USA Jan Holthoff’s landscapes foster a wealth of sensual presence that is imparted through the intense effectuality of their colour. The loftiness of their motifs—whether comprised of Alpine massifs, Dolomite peaks, or exotic idealisations of an Indian atmosphere—summon the sense of yearning in the form of pictorial mementos from among the beholder’s visual treasury.

Appearing upon first glance, or when viewed from a distance, as presenting clearly formulated pictorial motifs, the paintings tend, upon closer examination, to undergo a process of dissolution. Their solidly arranged realism and the localisation of the motifs within the paintings in accordance with classic compositional principles begins to become translucent and enigmatic. Central elements of the motifal groupings or the determinative motifs themselves appear to float before the background, as though moved from a desire to detach themselves from it altogether. This disengagement of the pictorial planes from one another is indeed apt to assert itself with considerable dominance over the actual motifs, taking on a life of its own and spreading the portent of an apocalyptic dynamic over the landscape. In the most successful compositions, the disbandment of the pictorial space is achieved with a subtlety that allows the motifs to retain their precedence and yet charges the space with an extraordinary energy.

The disruption of the pictorial planes within Holthoff’s landscapes is founded—when viewed from a production-aesthetical perspective—upon a stylistic dualism: he presents the beholder with an informal, gestural style of painting, essentially abstract and oriented toward materiality, juxtaposed by a realistically formulated landscape motif in the foreground. The gruffly pastose and personal nature of the gesturally painted structures of the backgrounds provide the tonal and atmospheric temperament to the final landscapes. Holthoff’s colour choices are based upon abstract colour studies undertaken by the artist during his journeys through North America, the Alps or to India. Respectively, the realistic motifs reflect photographed landscape-situations, architecture and natural phenomena that serve the artist as part of a memorial archive. The colours and images from this archive are freely transformed by Holthoff as they are incorporated into the working process. Through the staggering of the spatial planes, integrated architectural motifs and the dramatically towering, space-convoluting mountain peaks, the resulting images appear as approachments, as multiply fractured and recomposed visual memorials.

This distance between the originally seen and the painterly staged motif is revealed to the discerning gaze: the landscapes appear fairytale-like; they take on the character of images from a dream and are sustained from an energy that issues forth from far beyond the motifs. It is with this romantic quality of the motif that the often pointedly implemented stylistic fissures—which deliberately question the notion of seeing as the basis for epiphany—finally correspond. A way of seeing that is bound to terms and perceptual patterns is by all means able to delineate the single forms; the substantive contiguity between these, however, remains concealed, thus nurturing a yearning—a foreboding.

Michael Voets
Kunstraum Düsseldorf, Germany