Color (rules)

Donachie and Heppner. 
22 November 2012 – 9 February 2013
Spazio Cabinet, Milan

The color is fixed, it penetrates the threads of the canvas accompanied by the bristles of a brush or by the fluidity of water. In a sort of contemporary tonalism, that entrusts the color and its variations of intensity with the emerging of a plastic form, soft chromatic modulations mould and describe shapes and volumes. The compositional structure emerges from the accumulation of touches of color and the sculpture reveals itself in the changeable presence of the color. "A mixture, for concretions and shadows, of light of the world with the matter of things", a pictorial Orphism free from the geometric abstraction and made contemporary by the actual recovery of subjective experiences. The resolution is full of signs loaded with light and vibrant plasticity without structural limits - Kaye Donachie and Dagmar Heppner seem to indulge in the rules of color - that becomes Romantic temperature and register of visual misunderstandings for Donachie, while primordial and instinctive idea in Heppner's redundant sculpture.

Donachie's painting carries out an intimate research made of temporal clues just suggested, of gloomy faces in a suspended time, of images emerging and getting lost in intense coloured scenes. They are crystallizations of lost moments, of interrupted stories, where alienating elements give the story other meanings. The implementation of a pictorial surreality is transposed on the titles of her works that suggest a kind of figuration made up of mysterious faces wrapped in desolate landscapes or androgynous female nudes, defined by few strong brushstrokes. The color designs, the tone sets light and shadows, as the sculptor does with the stone, Donachie takes the matter off to let the light in, she lights hidden fluid scenes to imprint in one's memory what otherwise would get lost.

Heppner's sculptural work materially realizes the choise of a strong tone, stripes of color design space defining a free abstraction fixed in the air. A light cloth, suspended, becomes a three-dimensional gesture that falls to the floor to lean out, shapeless and spontaneous, in volumetric concretions made of light and shadow. Spatial painting or two-dimensional sculpture, Heppner's work seems to be an air transcription of an axonometric construction; she starts from a minimal chromatic sign that she turns in a complex solid in a triumph of rhythmic opulence of light and shade effects. 32 metres of cloth dance in a hypothetical Euclidean space. 32 nuances mixed with themselves imprint on the canvas a compressed tone that is subjected to obscure color rules.

Maria Chiara Valacchi, Wall Street International Magazine