RECYCLED TIME

Contemporary art crystallizes the present.
Olivier Heinry's latest works force is to this conclusion once again.
In Heinry's large panels, for example, the material becomes the medium by converting in Warholian fashion an image of time (a planning board) into an instant of the marketable image-whether pornographic or other, at any rate functional and henceforth digitally reproducible - in a process of transformation which intensifies the metaphorical self-quoting image of the electronic media's fragmented, depthless frontality. No aesthetic nostalgia veils the presence of the visual devices that moreover minimally reduce the gap between perception and interpretation, thereby accentuating their obviousness.

As for Heinry's paintings, they are horizontally-displayed juxtapositions of slender, vertically-produced, almost random linear drippings which accumulate in strata as a result of being rotated 90 degrees. This simple change of orientation establishes a kind of sedimentary deposit of time-as-duration within the instantaneousness of the artist's initial gesture. The sluggish fluidity of the originally-downward streaks is preserved under the guise of lines of tension which appears to work one side of a volume, producing an extremely tenuous perspectival illusion.  We're reminded, though without a hit of epigonism, of the painting that Clement Greenberg was still championing in the sixties.

We encounter this three-dimensionality again - a perfectly real one this time - in Heinry's newspaper stacks. Its literalness has all the concentrated, dry resonance of John Cage's pieces revisited by Fluxus - the prosaic, solidified residue of Mallarmé's "virginal, vital, beautiful today" whose remains are transfigured into a tautological derivation of the now.

Thanks to the compatibility of their materials and the intention they generate and activate as they're being shaped by a controlled inventiveness able to avoid the pitfalls of virtuosity, Heinry's recent pieces look like they're ready to face the test of time.

Richard Crevier
Paris - January 2002