German artist André Butzer’s (Stuttgart, 1973) third solo exhibition at the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery focusses on his most recent painting. Distanced from subject matter, narrativity and the subjective, Butzer now delves deep into pictorial questions related to colour and light. Despite presenting a body of work dominated by paintings that are entirely black, though not monochrome, with their respective nuances, tonalities and subtle appearances of whitish hues, for Butzer black is part of the road he has embarked on towards the essential. Far from how they might be interpreted, these paintings do not constitute either a beginning or an end. They are vast painted surfaces in search of a spiritual balance which consciously ees from both idea and corporality. The painter himself has stated, with regard to earlier works, a prelude to the ones on display here, that “I did not need ideas, I wasn’t looking at anything specific, but rather the painting emerged on its own”, alluding to a certain faith or intuition that is present in his actions.

In the same way, and although obviously these new paintings rise out of the dissolution of the previous ones, the so-called N-Bilder (N-Paintings), a group or works which he began to work on around 2010, they should not be considered in terms of series but, rather, as a succession: in spite of the similarity of conception shared by each one of these paintings, and the colour black that extends across them all, the artist himself avoids the idea of series; for Butzer the only thing that exists is the next painting, the next work to be painted. There is nothing else; he only knows that he will paint a painting related to the previous one and, even were he to try to paint exactly the same thing as the previous painting, it would inevitably be a new painting. And this is the basis for his distancing himself from the concept of series.
The N-Bilder make a specific allusion to a measure invented by the painter himself. Not as a sort of rational calculation but as a representation of a fertile pictorial area. Throughout recent years, the vital conscience of André Butzer, his esotericism and spirituality, have given rise to a body of work which he himself calls “light pressure”. And that is what his new paintings produce. A force which is incorporeal and yet holds a physical impact, static and mobile at the same time, and which, between proximity and distance, constitutes a road towards the absolute objective.