CHRISTOPH TANNERT

whirling brood of lines in half-spaces



Networks of lines, a whole labyrinth of intertwined paths, on which the aesthetic load-bearers drift back and forth as if time were out of joint – that’s these runways of form that slowly announces itself, piece by piece. Heiner Franzen’s paintings and drawings draw their strength from linear entanglements, created in completely this-worldly heads and figures in space.
What is brought to paper here is not any expectation of change, but a constant process of continual, active changing and of the new creation in which the artist sees himself placed.

It is already agreeably apparent at first glance that here an artist is not working from a know-it-all affectation, but on nothing beside the form. But it isn’t at all as if style, forms, and attitudes stood in the foreground with Franzen. The artist constantly roams through and turns around spaces in the picture, taking them apart, putting them back together in a different way, as if what was there to be seen were hidden. These sign-spaces thereby become his second skin, which he is forced to cut open and operate away because it constrains him, stands in the way of critical self-contemplation, and hides meaning.
All the darker (and lighter) prognoses about the change in our world seem to be bundled together in inextricable crisis scenarios in which the artist himself dwells, as if in the interior of a sound, where the figures’ psychological vibrations spread in gentle, but also vehement wave motions from light to dark.

Heiner Franzen cannot be summed up in a word, and whoever tries to do it will be unable to shake the feeling of trying to straighten out someone who cannot endure such treatment.
Heiner Franzen develops his paintings and drawings in mixed media. He uses gouache, acrylic, and oil paints, and in his drawings usually edding pens and pencils of various hardnesses. For a picture surface, he employs plotter paper in meter-wide rolls; after working, reworking, and cutting it, he affixes it to canvas.
Heiner Franzen does not work in a collage process, though clearly by an additive principle. But it is more a process of layering and piling, in which certain forms are repeated. But instead of charging up his pictures for effect, Heiner Franzen unburdens them of superfluity, by cutting out and cutting up the papers and forms. What remains is a concentrate of the picture, reduced to its essence. Such a method reminds one of the man who must be the most important music producer of the last 20 years – Rick Rubin, who works similarly in his medium. On the cover of his first production, “Radio”, the 1985 debut of LL Cool J, we read, in place of the usual “produced by”, “reduced by Rick Rubin”.

As the title of Heiner Franzen’s current series “Clusterville” underscores, these are formations for which the artist seeks a unit for housing (“ville”) or in which the viewer should feel accepted and sheltered. Heiner Franzen works with palpably dynamic means that allow the pure expressive power and the beauty of lived spirituality, which he potentiates, to become fully real: we are people who affirm enlightenment. Chock-full of enigmatic poetic and inward character, the temperamentally elaborated pictures are nonetheless not heartfelt outpourings condensed into hairballs. Franzen rigorously cuts away everything that curdles in the stream of painting. What remains is only the substance, with an aura of conflict buffeting it.

Franzen regards the drawing as a pure suggestion for action. In ever-new courses of mood, he extends the drawing into painting. Everything aims to remain primal. With Franzen, drawing must never have the subordinate character of preparatory work, but, from the beginning, wants to be the completely valid work. With dialectically scintillating understanding, the artist surveys the linear frayings and states of anxiety until he finds himself completely in the picture, until making contact turns into dwelling therein and the line turns into an umbilical cord that connects the external and the internal.

When the form calls for attention, coarseness is born and remnants of motifs are overcome. Out of a half-space of form, an informal internal structure develops that transforms into unsurveyable circumstances, line by line, that makes labyrinthine strayings unavoidable, and that makes the fragmentary seem like an anarchistic miracle.

Franzen does not invent. The course of the lines invents itself, running away with the artist. Somewhere, an organism that provides impulses grows, and then the web begins to live. Sometimes the artist approaches his papers like a stranger coming to Clusterville only in order to experience how things will continue. He enters his pictures as into landscapes.
We see the traces of his stays, though the point is not to describe squares and the sights. Worth seeing and an event (!) are the blind, unconscious, whirling brood of lines in which the artist can enjoy his stories – as we enjoy ours. (2007)