Jan Holthoff’s ‘Frozen Gestures’ (catalogue text 2013)
Comprising a series of painterly explorations, Jan Holthoff’s images chart a landscape of gestures, capturing the fluctuating light and rhythm of their urban surroundings. Stepping out from the artist’s studio, the streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn stretch haphazardly into the distance. Under a wide sweep of azure sky, lofts and warehouses dissolve into a patchwork of brick facades and metal roll-gates traced by the looping arcs of spray-painted graffiti. Environment here becomes an experience of mobility and space, a sensory landscape that unravels in all directions amidst a shimmering haze of asphalt and concrete.
Born in Duisburg, Germany in 1977, Holthoff’s paintings channel a playfulness that mitigates the sober formality of the artist’s education at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, notably under the mentorship of the Swiss painter Helmut Federle. This formal rigor is discernible in the artist’s paintings, which engage with the thematics of a craft still firmly indebted to the legacy of mid-century Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism.
Holthoff cites Joan Mitchell, Willem de Kooning, Jaspar Johns and Christopher Wool as a triumvirate of artistic influences; to these one might also add Cy Twombly, although the absence of text- crucial to the semantic operation of that artist’s work- denotes an important distinction. By contrast, Holthoff’s paintings are more purely abstract.
The interweaving of abstract and representational themes initiated in Holthoff’s early paintings gives way to a more subtle dissolution of structure and form in the artist’s most recent ‘Frozen Gestures’ series. These paintings explore a vocabulary of formal techniques, notably in the layering of surface effects to achieve textural variety. While the handling of paint and the apparent looseness of its application suggest a degree of unchecked spontaneity, there is also a sense of deliberation in these works, as in the superimposition of compositional forms. Indeed it is this mediation between expressive impulse and exercised restraint that makes these paintings so visually satisfying; these are images at the cusp of harmonic resolution, the gestural traces of their execution frozen in time.
Hung portrait-style, these vertical images are leading us to reflect upon the interrelationship of subject, medium, process and perception. As paintings they register in both directions- as markers of the artist’s material trace, just as they simultaneously summon something outside of themselves like illusion and space. Painting consequently assumes a more conceptual definition, hinging on a notion of confrontation between artist and canvas in which the distinction between subject and object effectively dissolves.
While the intrusion of language provides the most evident marker of a conceptual turn in painting, its absence is not to say the medium retreats into itself. The paintings present here are works of expressive depth and formal intelligence, revealed through the skillful handling of color and balance of compositional structure. Each image offers a moment of reflection in which the eye is never still but rather dances from one event to the next; their verticality confronts us and we in turn peer inside and beyond their many surfaces.
Ultimately, Holthoff’s works affirm the view that painting still holds a capacity for expressive revelation.
William Helfrecht is an independent curator, critic and staff member of Luhring Augustine based in NYC. He received his MA in Modern Art from Columbia University.
For No Reason at All - Evangelos Papadopuolos and Jan Holthoff at Kunstverein Bochum (Catalogue text 2024)
Evangelos Papadopoulos and Jan Holthoff have given their joint exhibition at Kunstverein Bochum a title with philosophical implications. Behind the title For No Reason at All lies the question of a justification of art beyond all external expectations and tendencies to instrumentalise it. This catalogue is not the place to revisit the philosophical discourse that has developed around this question over the course of a long theoretical history. Rather, the following is about discussing the specific artistic response that Papadopoulos and Holthoff have found in their works.
Both are located in the field of abstract art, renouncing representational depiction and figurative legibility. They operate beyond conceptual attributions and spoken messages. In the words of Günter Wohlfahrts: "The pictures [and sculptures, the author] are not the illustration of a meaning that could also be expressed."[1]Rather, both Holthoff and Papadopoulos pursue an approach that understands art as a space of potential in which process and event become central categories. Their works are based on an open creative concept in which calculation, chance and spontaneity are synthesised.
"The aesthetically significant does not have meaning, it gives meaning, it forms meaning, it makes meaning for me - or not."[2] Wohlfahrt explains. The centre of interest here is not a pre-existing meaning implemented in the artwork, which has to be read out again afterwards. Rather, it is about a process of aesthetic meaning making that takes place between the artwork and the viewer. As Wohlfahrt points out: "Aesthetic experience is an experience of meaning. But the meaning we are talking about here is not something given from elsewhere, but something that first arises."[3].
This cannot and should not be about presenting an absolute point of view. Nevertheless, it seems to me not only to touch on a central point of art in general, it also proves to be particularly adequate and helpful for approaching art such as that of Evangelos Papadopoulos and Jan Holthoff. This demands nothing more, but also nothing less, from the viewer than an unbiased engagement with the work; an entry into a process of interaction between the work and the viewer, an openness to new visual and perceptual experiences.
Such an aesthetic creation of meaning cannot be conceived outside the work of art. It can only be found in the moment, in a sensual approach to the respective work, in a comprehension of the particular artistic design in the interplay of form and material, in tracing the tensions and dynamics inscribed in it, including associative connections or symbolic references. This is not a punctual process, but an ultimately inconclusive process of turning back and forth, a constant reorientation of observation within the complexity that the work of art brings with it in the multi-layered interplay of its various elements.
In view of the works by Papadopoulos and Holthoff, the experience arises that they stand in contrast to everything that could be seen outside the artwork. Their structures, patterns and shapes cannot be matched with images that we might encounter or have ever encountered elsewhere. Nor do they follow any identifiable scheme that would be recognisable as a formalisable procedure behind the form-finding. The works speak for themselves in their own right. As viewers, we remain thrown back on the work of art and ultimately on ourselves. When confronted with art, we become acutely aware of our subjectivity and presence. By engaging with art, we experience ourselves in a network of far-reaching temporal, spatial and meaningful references. We enter, in the words of Martin Seel, into a "process that we cannot pay attention to without paying attention to the presence of our existence with sensual intensity."[4]
So far, key similarities in the art of Evangelos Papadopoulos and Jan Holthoff have been emphasised. These are sometimes essential characteristics that can be attributed to art in general. However, in the context of abstract art, as practised by Papadopoulos and Holthoff, these characteristics emerge with particular clarity. Since neither spoken narratives nor other explanatory models can be used; since nothing leads away from the art itself and shifts it to other fields of discourse, those aspects that arise in the direct confrontation between the work and the viewer inevitably come to the fore. The moment of experience becomes the primary concern of art.
Despite their conceptual proximity, the works of the two artists appear very different to us. In the relatively small, almost square exhibition space of the Kunstverein Bochum, an exciting dialogue develops between the paintings by Jan Holthoff, which occupy the wall surfaces, and the expansive sculptural interventions by Evangelos Papadopoulos. The mostly light colours of Holthoff's canvases form a visible contrast to Papadopoulos' spatial installations made of crude wooden slats and standard plasterboard, rather sparse materials that are reminiscent of the material aesthetics of Arte Povera.
A parallel to this can be found in Holthoff's painting. In addition to the use of oil or acrylic paint, which is common in painting, the increased use of spray paint, which is otherwise associated with street art, is particularly striking in the more recent pictures. Here a game of subcultural coding unfolds with the simplicity and banality of the material, which undermines the highly cultural claim of the painted canvas. On the one hand, Holthoff's painting is clearly related to the history of abstract-gestural painting as it has developed since the middle of the 20th century; on the other hand, this tradition is subtly refracted.
The differences based on the specific conditions of the respective medium emerge more clearly with regard to the dimension of the spatial than with questions of materiality. Evangelos Papadopoulos' interventions made of wood and plasterboard are manifestations of the material in physical space. From the characteristic curvature in the corner of the exhibition space, the progressive forms enter into the room with their own inherent dynamism, in turn creating a dynamisation of the room itself. The interweaving of wooden slats and plasterboard panels pushing in all directions generates a multitude of vistas and interior spaces, lending the room a new, almost sculptural quality.[5]
In contrast, space manifests itself in a completely different way in Jan Holthoff's panel paintings. These also open up a specific experience of space, but this is a purely visual space. Actually fixed in the surface of the image support, spaces of colour open up into the depths through translucent colour structures. Spatial staggering can also be discerned by means of opaque surfaces or lines, usually applied to the "classical" painting with spray paint, which evokes a figure-ground relationship - a before and behind. A dialectic specific to painting unfolds here, a collapse of surface and space, which Michael Polanyi described with the concept of "flat depth".[6]
A video work by Evangelos Papadopoulos, which shows a monitor lying on a flat platform made of aluminium profiles, opens up yet another space, namely the virtual space of digital images. In it, the camera circles a strange sculptural object, an ambivalent, partly technical, partly amorphous form, the materiality of which can only be vaguely determined. This object has no equivalent in the physical world. Generated by the artist as a computer 3D model, it exists exclusively in the structures of the computer and is only visible to us humans on the screen - on the surface as it were.
Evangelos Papadopoulos' video work is not insightful in what it shows, but also in how it shows it. The virtual camera constantly takes on new perspectives. It always looks at the object from new perspectives, zooms in to examine individual details more closely, then moves away again to gain another overview. This is an example of a mode of reception that can be applied to the viewing of art in general and has already been characterised above as an inconclusive process.
The works of Evangelos Papadopoulos and Jan Holthoff focus on this essential inconclusiveness. They do not provide any conclusive answers. Rather, they are linked to the idea of an open work of art, as described by Umberto Eco. The aim here is to make the recipient "the active centre of a network of inexhaustible relationships under which he produces his form without being determined by a necessity that prescribes the definitive modes of organising the work of art to be interpreted."[7] The works, it could be emphatically formulated, strive to "evoke acts of conscious freedom in the interpreter."[8] A higher value, including in moral terms, can hardly be attributed to art.
Reinhard Buskies, Artistic Director Kunstverein Bochum 2024
[1] Günter Wohlfahrt, Das Schweigen des Bildes. Bemerkungen zum Verhältnis von philosophischer Ästhetik und bildender Kunst. In: Gottfried Boehm (ed.), Was ist ein Bild?. Munich 1994, p. 175.
[2] ibid, p. 175.
[3] ibid., p. 174f.
[4] Martin Seel, Ästhetik des Erscheinens. Munich Vienna 2000, p. 160f.
[5] see: Gottfried Boehm, Plastik und plastischer Raum. In: Gundolf Winter, Jens Schröter, Joanna Barck (ed.): Das Raumbild. Bilder jenseits ihrer Flächen. Munich 2009, p. 21-46.
[6] Michael Polanyi, Was ist ein Bild? In: Gottfried Boehm (ed.), Was ist ein Bild? Munich 1994, p. 155.
[7] Umberto Eco, Das offene Kunstwerk. 8th edition, Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 31.
[8] ibid.