Hollis Heichemer’s solo exhibition at Hollis Taggart titled “moving in stillness” is a profound investigation of existence and the meaning of the world through the study of landscapes and Mother Nature. Is Humanism an anthropocentric perspective that is ultimately flawed and furnishes humanity with the arrogance to destroy the environment and disregard the principles of empathy? How can we overcome the diseased thought that humans have the right to master or exploit nature for profit? And how has the artist found great peace and liberation through her lifelong study of Mother Nature and her generous nourishment and wisdom? Does Heichemer apply the paint purely as a formal exercise of abstract colors and relationships, or does the paint become the flesh of Mother Nature, by the observation of which we can become and live through the painting as landscapes?

Certain similarities and influences could be observed, if stretched, between Heichemer’s works and those of Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, and Zao Wou-Ki, but in fact Heichemer’s oil paintings stand on their own terms as highly original abstractions. Heichemer charts out a self-referential ecosystem of visions and outcomes that communicate and compare with one another. This is to say that the artist invents her own visual language of abstraction that does not reference an external source but her own works. Often, Heichemer’s paintings reject the idea of a center or the need for a grounding orientation, suggesting an upward or downward direction that is usually associated with paintings conceived as landscapes. The space in Heichemer’s abstract paintings is neither Euclidean nor isometric; rather, it is psychological and immersive, composed as if it were zoomed and cropped in a panoramic fashion. Imagine the artist jogging through the hills and the trails around her New England home – the passing foliage and glimmers of light and shadow may be the inspirational starting point for her abstract landscape paintings. 

Heichemer’s images are imbued with empathy and understanding that originate from a position of generosity and abundance. There is great thoughtfulness in the playfulness of her strokes and colors, but the work remains in the middle ground, neither fully maximalist nor minimalist. The artist establishes a system of exchange and relationships between the colors and the marks, consisting of thinly glazed washes, abstract, dynamic strokes suggesting a flurry of motion, and the sweet moments revealed by strokes that the artist chose not to paint over. 

She is learning to speak the language of the grass and the leaves of the trees that dance in the warm embrace of sunlight as they engage in photosynthesis. She is suggesting an imaginary world or logic, like a physics engine, where the natural and vegetal elements begin to move up, down, and sideways in a dynamic waltz or tango, defying our animal-centric bias that they are just static objects lacking in agency. Perhaps the vegetal life is communicating in a collective dream, in a non-physical, shared virtual realm that we humans cannot access in material reality, but Heichemer sees snippets of this mysterious, spiritual realm through her abstract paintings.