Heinz Butz at SALOON: the perfectly imperfect line

“Das reine Sein als Anfang” is the 92-year-old German’s first solo exhibition in Brussels. That is remarkable because Butz’s work – comprising drawings, paintings, and Bildobjekte – attests to a rare combination of profound experience and playful freshness. One possible reason for his absence is that he has focused for decades on a modest and retiring but persistent and intensive studio practice. For the past seventy years, he has drawn every day, without any partiality, but with great focus and a receptive spirit. Creation and comprehension coalesce in the same moment, when he puts pencil to paper. He combines a naive outlook with analytical thoroughness and the organic with the geometrical. In this continuous question of form, colour, and material, imperfection is a side-effect, but it is also the open window on the world through which life trickles in.

About to break out
And Heinz Butz’s works burst with life. He began his explorations in the 1940s, and after the war he joined the Naturforschende Gesellschaft Augsburg. He found greatness in the small things in nature, and gradually developed his own vocabulary in an alphabet of horizontal and vertical lines, diagonals, and curves. In the period in which Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella were combining painting and sculpture, Butz was doing the same, in silence.

The results – as you can see in the works at SALOON, which cover the period from 1953 until 2008 – are serene, minimalist explorations in which a modest human hand unmistakeably shines through, as though it is almost overwhelmed by the lines and frames that urge to break out, but yet manages to keep them all under control somewhere between the abstract and the figurative. It is as though you are witnessing a dialogue between two equal partners who can never seem to get enough of each other.

The relationship that Heinz Butz fosters with the world around us is phenomenally attractive. The translation of that world in his works occurs via a search for a formal essence that can only be called sensory, sensual, intuitive…and ultimately ungraspable. The only possible conclusion is that Heinz Butz knows more than we do. His works gauge, tentatively and searchingly approach a core that we so often disregard. They show that which sometimes insistently compels the pencil, thus making a perfectly imperfect line visible. That little line, drawn in slow millimetres with a pencil, etched into resin covered chipboard, or in the form of a cord connecting two subtle figures, may well be the fuse that blasts this entire oeuvre to life.

> Heinz Butz: Das reine Sein als Anfang > 13/5, SALOON