JULIEN HEINTZ

Heintz uses photographs and documentary stills tied to episodes that marked Western culture, especially war and its aftermath. Yet he does not paint acts of cruelty directly. He turns instead to charged pauses and faces caught between events, attentive to the quiet weight that follows violence. What matters is not reconstruction for its own sake, but the possibility of handling trauma with care and restraint.

Several works take Walter Jackson Freeman II as a point of departure, the American neurologist who performed lobotomies for four decades. Heintz started from archival photographs of women labelled hysterical and deemed unfit for society. In those documents, their faces appear before and after the procedure. Many were not suffering from severe mental illness. In the artist’s treatment, clinical description gives way to an uneasy mode of witness. These are portraits shaped by what institutions project onto a body, and by what survives that imposition. Elsewhere, Russian soldiers in ushanka hats derive from prison imagery linked to Operation Barbarossa. Again, Heintz avoids illustration. He stays with the human presence inside the historical frame.

The visual sources often come from film footage, and that sense of suspended time endures within the work. Forms do not settle into certainty. Features seem to emerge and withdraw at once, as if the surface were holding a memory in motion. For Heintz, this is crucial. “I’m trying to capture that moment while respecting the atmosphere,” he says. Even when a figure is cropped, he insists on knowing the wider setting from which that person has been taken. Context may not be fully visible, but it governs the framing, giving each canvas its inner tension. The result is not fixed narrative, but a field of suggestion where intimacy and geopolitics are tightly bound.

That tension is also material. Before painting, Heintz prepares every support with a gesso of marble powder, rabbit-skin glue, and water. It is dense and mineral. It recalls fresco and the Quattrocento artists he has studied closely. Across it, oil builds in successive layers. The making of each work is slow and exacting. Heintz values craftsmanship and wants every piece to exist as a finely wrought object. Repetition is part of that discipline, but never as routine. Each attempt shifts. Each outcome carries a distinct tone. He likens the process to music composition, with different voices brought into relation until the whole begins to resonate. The labour is patient, almost meditative.

A spectral quality runs through Nouveaux Tableaux, though not in any gothic or uncanny way. It belongs to remembrance. Heintz approaches the past in order to ask what lingers, and how neglected stories bear on the world today. The exhibition invites immersion in that unstable territory where individual destinies meet larger forces. Nothing here is reduced to innocence or guilt alone. Each subject holds its own burden. Together, they open onto a broader register, letting viewers move between singular lives and a shared condition.

Text by Nicolas Vamvouklis