This exhibition features Julius Heinemann’s most recent watercolour production. The title alludes to how each set of works looks into a certain thread of thought, while gravitating around the notion that subjective vision, along with the recognition of identity, are drivers of creation. It also refers to the typically fragmented and essentially humanistic writings of Michel de Montaigne, Novalis, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Fernando Pessoa.

Julius Heinemann’s watercolours are arranged on the gallery walls like virtual windows. Through them, the exhibition space, once a domestic environment, opens up its quiet intimacy to the outside. The watercolours encapsulate glimmers of the outside world, which unfolds parallel to private space, and to every author’s interiority. In them, Heinemann explores themes such as the perception of space, of light and shadow, as well the polysemy of maritime landscapes and the weight of everyday objects. These are tactful reflections on existence in the broadest sense. Each watercolour operates like and aphorism and synthesizes a concrete experience to project it onto the subjective temporality of artistic production.

Essay also operates as a counterpart to the large-scale installation O Espelho [The Mirror], conceived specifically for Casa da Cerca in Almada, and the first institutional exhibition of Heinemann’s work in Portugal. While the gallery space is suffused with vital flow – external sensorial experience brought into the private domain – the Almada installation proposes a movement from inner to outer space and the public domain. These projects interlock like identical and opposite hands whose symmetry conceals the functional dissymmetry that characterizes the human condition.

Yara Sonseca Mas

Julius Heinemann is interested in the subjective experience of space, time, colour and light. Through paintings, drawings and installations, his work examines what we see and how we create reality – individually, collectively – questioning the physical, sensual and cultural paradigms on which our perception of the world is based.

Heinemann studied Photography at the Folkwang University, Essen, as well as the HGB Leipzig, and holds an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London. He has received numerous scholarships, notably from the DAAD and the Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, and participated in artistic residencies in Brazil, Mexico and Italy. He has exhibited internationally, among others, in London, Amsterdam, Zurich, Bogotá, Mexico City and São Paulo.