Emanuel Heim isn’t interested in static things, but in painting’s ability to capture changeable moods and the constant flux of consciousness. The unexpected rhythms of music, the ebb and flow of conversation, the subjectivity of time – these are all important influences on the energy of his works. With their tangled, vibrant compositions, his paintings stage restless oppositions between abstraction and figuration, space and surface, freedom and control.

Heim often starts a painting without a clear idea of where it will end up. Improvising with large, intuitive gestures, he begins by moving paint around until a composition begins to take shape. From here he collages fragments of memory, dreams and staged images to create illusory spaces in which the distinctions between surface, depth and gravity come loose. In his portraits, Heim seeks to depict a period of time rather than a single 'snapshot' image. Inviting friends to sit for a painting in his studio, he’ll often dress them in his own brightly patterned clothing to introduce contrasting textures. Half clashing, half blending with these patterns, Heim's subjects seem on the verge of merging with their surroundings, while the surroundings themselves expand and disperse into loose, abstract detail. A recurring feature is the concentric rings of colour that drift across so many of his canvases. Resembling thinly sliced discs of rock-candy, warped smoke rings, or spiralling portals to another image, they disrupt the spatial logic, sometimes curling around a figure’s limbs, sometimes appearing to slide across the image on a different plane altogether. Are they manifestations of some invisible phenomena like the musical notes plucked out on one figure's guitar? Or something even less tangible, more ineffable, something we so often call, for lack of a better word, a vibe?

The influence of music is certainly evident in the dynamic palette and rhythmic punctuation of space in Heim's practice. The guitar player has been a recurring protagonist in Heim's portraits, a jazz musician friend who sometimes visits Heim in his studio to compose and practice. These two complementary states – composition and practice – provide an interesting metaphor for a recent shift in Heim's approach. Entering a period of transition and reflection, Heim has begun to build on the improvisational nature that drove earlier paintings by paying new attention to the nuanced stages of his process. While ‘composition’ requires free-floating attention and loose experimentation, ‘practising’ meanwhile suggests studied repetition, discipline, concentration. These opposing states of mind coexist and complement in Heim's work: the painting of repeating patterns requires a certain persistence of will and control – a counterpoint which balances the shifting, loose mentality of improvised abstraction.

Works such as 'Im Wind' and 'Im Nebel’ further illustrate the artist's interest in the coexistence of mental states and temporal flux. In these scenes, trees and forests appear to be completely enmeshed in swirling mist; the sturdy repetition of vertical trunks ground the composition with a sense of stability, while the tendrils of ethereal paint flood the image with a ghostly, ephemeral atmosphere. The question arises, however, as to which element is more dependent on the other. Does the forest provide the structure for the wind, or is it the wind that binds the forest together? Perhaps this question lies at the heart of many of Heim's paintings, where the relationship between stillness and movement, space and surface is an ever shifting co-dependency, and time itself is a textured, woven thing.

Text by: Bryony Dawson