Julien Heintz

Julien Heintz’s canvases attract and fascinate. Emerging from vague, crepuscular, almost menacing backgrounds, faces stand out from his canvases with their dark palette. Often mixing his own pigments based on marble powder, Julien Heintz works the materiality of the work to put 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 the spectrum seems essential to understand the work of this young painter, who has just graduated from the Beaux Arts of Paris 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 makes up a face, whose features are as singular as they are 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.