a turn in its line / tomorrow is my turn
September 28 - November 15, 2025
CEASUUR
Lange Noordstraat 67 | Middelburg

When does a gesture speak? Can an opening reach itself? Who looks back?

In this exhibition Micha Patiniott explores the possibility of direct contact with self and voice. Through paintings and a video, he follows the moment when expression turns inward. Figuration appears as intimacy: a hand, a figure glimpsed from behind. The images circle around a hollow. In a video Nina Simone sings, while a text folds into tautologies, echoes of Gertrude Stein’s continuous present. Together the works form a loop of deferred openings.

A self-published artist’s book (A5, 86 pages, edition of 25) accompanies the exhibition.

The installation unfolds across three walls, each staging a different register of Micha Patiniott’s vocabulary of gesture, opening, and surface: intimacy, fractured looking back, looping in time and space. The gallery's own "fragments of reopened time" - visible layers of history in the architecture - mirror what Patiniott is exploring in his paintings.

The left wall feels closest to the body, but only in glimpses. The back of a figure at a desk, the frozen hand, the doubled folds that look like hearts or wounds: each painting offers intimacy, but withheld. Against the textured, aged wall, these works feel like palimpsests, as if the body is written over and over, each gesture bleeding through, forming an opening.

At the middle wall, the register shifts. Instead of fragments of a body, we see the openings themselves: voids, apertures, thresholds. They are at once bodily (navel, orifice, eye socket) and cosmic (black hole, a portal into elsewhere), scale slipping between inside and beyond.

To the right, there is a breach and return. Here, the body comes back through rupture. A face peers through the skin of paper, confronting the viewer directly. A hand presses outward, caught in the act of puncturing the surface. Placed against the brick arch, they read theatrically, like figures staged within an opening.

Suspended in between, the video The Whole Story introduces Nina Simone’s voice and a tautological text inspired by Gertrude Stein. It breaks the plane of the walls and asserts a different temporality.