02.04.22 – 30.04.22
Solo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Lötz is interested in spaces of emotional resonance. In his work, he manipulates the capacity for paint to render organic forms and natural cycles of growth and decay. This process forms part of a personal visual shorthand – a painterly proficiency borne from tacit learning. With inventive and pioneering use of the encaustic wax painting technique, Lötz mines the primordial soup behind identifiable matter to produce unearthly scenes, running a range from horrific to pastoral. His gestural, non-literal matterscapes deliberately avoid easy description and instead express a tacit dialogue between the subject matter and his emotional response to it. These paintings and sculptures address both personal and global concerns as the artist probes at nature’s indifference, prowess and vulnerability and tracks its endless pattern of destruction and renewal.

‘Murmurs’ abandons the idea of a supposedly realist picturesque depiction of the world, celebrating instead the indeterminate nature of a place filtered by the imperfect mind. The forceps of our perception crushes what it sees—to observe is to destroy—final presence vanquishes legibility. The unbound world is fluid and dangerous. I want to feel a place where nothing is certain because nothing is explicitly shaped by words exclusively. Where there are no things, there is only a stream of manifold, nameless sensations shifting in fullness. ‘Murmurs’ is then not the precise documentation of a place but the absences of debris leftover, an uncertain question, a pause, a murmur between word and thing. A world we recognise but can’t explain.