“We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”
— Tao Te Ching

Micha Patiniott makes quiet, atmospheric paintings in which bodies, objects and surfaces hover between recognition and disappearance. A sheet of paper, a fold, an opening, a loop or a body part can shift from thing to body, from surface to space, from sign to sensation.

Through painting, Patiniott explores the unstable relation between material presence and immaterial charge. Muted colour, blurred edges and subtle shifts of scale reduce the image without emptying it: what remains becomes charged and open. The paintings hold perception in motion, between intimacy and distance, desire and emptiness, the everyday and the cosmic.

In Patiniott’s paintings, the surface often functions as a membrane: a boundary that lets something through, holds something back and comes under pressure. Images seem to emerge from within, appearing through light, haze, blurred edges or a nearly empty field. At other times, the image appears as a support or carrier: a sheet, a screen, an image within an image, or a fragment that feels photographic. Recurring motifs include folded or cut sheets of paper, luminous heads, drawing hands, skin-like openings, black ovals, looped Klein bottles and solarized phallic forms.

Patiniott works in thin, smooth layers, often using a restrained palette of greys, violets and blues, sometimes interrupted by brighter, almost artificial colour. Pink may slide from bubblegum to blush; yellow, green or blue can feel tender, erotic or almost toxic. Edges dissolve, forms appear suspended, and light becomes a fragile medium through which the image appears and destabilizes at the same time.

The body appears as a blurred presence: erotic, vulnerable and unfixed. The paintings carry an erotic charge, at times explicitly sexual, yet remain elusive, balancing tenderness with unease. Through colour, scale and isolation, explicit forms can become mental and atmospheric. At times the body seems to expand into cosmic space: a navel can become a black hole, a ripple an orbit. Looking becomes almost tactile, touching on projection, memory and desire.

Alongside painting, Patiniott develops text works, videos and artist’s books. These form a resonant space around the paintings, where references to film, music, literature, philosophy, art history and popular culture can appear without fixing the images into a single reading.

Micha Patiniott lives and works in Amsterdam. He was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

International solo and group exhibitions include:
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam
Anna Zorina Gallery (New York)
Dordrechts Museum
Whitechapel Gallery (London)
Arti et Amicitiae (Amsterdam)
Provincetown Art Association and Museum
Provinciehuis Noord-Holland (Haarlem)
Museum Hilversum
PuntWG (Amsterdam)
Cinnamon (Rotterdam)
Heden (Den Haag)
WHATSPACE (Tilburg)
MKgalerie (Rotterdam/Berlin)
Galerie Sturm (Nuremberg)
Chistian Ouwens Galerie (Rotterdam)