Dr. Roland März (Kurator Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin a.D.)
from the Catalogue Text: Paintings 2004-2006
Kerstin Heller is not lead by 'the idea' but by the joy of discovery brought by the mark-making of the hand. The first accents are set by the underpainting of the canvas. Agitated germs of form that grow greater on the event horizon: points and linear fragments. Plant-like forms emerge, broken by sharp angles, structural colour-forms ripen intuitively from these initial painterly decisions. These are held in balance between movement and stability. Through decisive strokes of the palette-knife, the colours grow from their pictorial ground, layer upon layer. Occasionally, flowing transparent colour is drawn across the canvas in a single stroke. Colour is 'force' and emerging form, fields of grids and oscillating lines are created. In the smaller pictures, a laconic punctuation rules, created by the coupling of scratchy lines and rounded forms. The slashes in the surface reveal the layers of colour beneath. Light-trails of visible energy emerge from the nothingness of forlorn blackness. A slowness and momentary inform Heller's painterly treatment. Perhaps the goal is the ever-present peacefulness in the composition. Absorption in the longed-for space of emptiness.
The internal workings of formulation are more important than decorative beauty. What has been achieved is constantly brought into doubt, its forms erased and overpainted. All signs and forms are kept 'simple' so as not to lose the intrinsic richness of creation to the realm of the spiritual. The new picture thus created is the sum of destruction which proceeded it. The names of the paintings, some with Japanese or Tibetan sounding titles, occur first after the pictures are completed. Relics of spiritual remembrances and self-encounters. They sometimes mean something, but not always. These paintings are vital pictorial inventions of the unintentional, balancing play and earnestness in the creative flow. To come closer to the 'actual' can mean 'to exist for itself alone' in these paintings of breath upon the surface.
Translation: Jon Evans