“Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly. He did not know whether he was Zhuangzi who dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.”
-  Zhuangzi, 4th century BC

My paintings unfold quietly, where everyday objects and bodies hover between clarity and disappearance. I'm drawn to those fragile spaces where perception, body, and voice meet, along the blurry line between inner and outer worlds. When does a gesture speak? Can an opening reach itself? Who looks back?

I’m particularly drawn to moments where expression doubles back on itself. What are the possibilities - and impossibilities - of direct contact with self and other? At the core is fragility: how breath or touch trembles as it turns into form. A line, a smudge can already waver or dissolve. This fragility is the starting point, the heart of my inquiry.

Certain motifs return: blank sheets of paper, drifting portraits, folds and wounds, solarized phallic forms, glowing brushes, hands that write or pierce. Loops, splits, and recursions thread through these works, suggesting painting folding back on itself. They carry an erotic charge, at times explicitly sexual, yet remain elusive, balancing tenderness with unease. At times, the body expands into cosmic space: a belly button becomes a black hole, ripples turn into orbits. Transience shows itself in a thorn's prick or a butterfly's wingbeat. These works stay close to the body and to where it opens: a slit in a sheet, ink bleeding across the skin. Surfaces behave like organs: porous, shifting. Pink slides from bubblegum to blush. The canvas itself carries memory, as earlier works fold back into the present. The past resurfaces, recursive but punctured.

Edges blur so that bodies and objects seem suspended. Desire and embodiment are never fixed, always shifting. Light isn’t depiction, but a fragile space where vision keeps trembling and shifting. I feel close to Caspar David Friedrich’s atmospheres, Fontana’s cuts, Guston’s mutable forms. At its center is the porousness of things: painting and language each reaching into a space of desire and delay. Zen koans and Daoist paradoxes shape its hesitation. Again and again, I return to the same kinds of questions: Does touch touch itself? Is seeing a ray? How close is the hollow?

Each work holds open a space where perception stays in motion, where the mundane meets the mystical, intimacy meets estrangement, and expression begins to unravel.

Micha Patiniott lives and works in Amsterdam.
He was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2006-07)
and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2008-09 and 2023-24).

International solo and group exhibitions include: