Thiago Hattnher, 'Timing Notes' : Curated by Brandy Carstens

Note-taking is central to the keen observer's behavior: briefly writing or drawing after perceiving something beautiful, despite most noteworthy things being ineffable. A labor of attempting to preserve an open memory, the note-in its polysemic play, from a musical indication to an annotated thought-holds a freedom of not comprising complete narratives, offering no rigorous context but rather alluring annotations for tale co-creation. At the same time, they hold an empathetic sense of sharing personal impressions of the outer world generously and honestly, reaffirming one's subjectivity while inviting the observer to experience a point of view and a state of mind. In Timing Notes, Thiago Hattnher (b. 1990, São Paulo, Brazil) empathetically presents an autobiographical constellation of pictorial notes that carry a sense of timelessness, alive in the fleshiness of outdated memories and the evocative potency of lasting longings. 

This pendulum dynamic between hopeful intent and candid decay-but also between how painting and music similarly deal with time-can synthesize Hattnher's ability to lock fleeting and ambiguous elements into concise, small-scale paintings. Congregating delicate chromatic and formal choices and extreme attention to the medium-which varies from rough burlap, collected wood, fine linen, and cotton canvases-, his works are recollections of images and experiences, unrestricted by a rigid disciplinary genre. The moonlit, silvery quality of petals coexist with mirage-like landscapes, fogged, remembered, in hued geometric fields. Even through a severe accumulation process, the artist paints just enough to leave room for the untouched.

As non-linear diagrams, Hattnher's paintings usually comprise color blocks, flower arrangements, and landscapes devised into a seemingly intuitive geometrical structure. Slight but sudden contrasting elements act as compositional and chromatic outbursts always directed towards a rhythmic intention, full of heterogeneous vibrations and tones, from lullabies to dramatic sonatas. Put in the same hierarchy-a blue rectangle is not a background, just as a flower bouquet or the silhouette of a hill do not obey the historical superiority attributed to a figure-, they are all imagetic and poetic experiments on rhythm, interval, and duration. Akin to a concert chart, these elements are multilayered, discoursing on these subjects not only in the relations between each other but within themselves: each part is a microcosm that reflects dense choices of paint handling, illumination by layer construction, hiatus between paint coats, and the ominous moment to stop and consider it finished. When assembled, they are finely orchestrated like the woodwinds, brass, percussion, strings, and keyboards of a symphony, each fulfilling a specific role individually and as a whole.

Hattnher reiterates the ambivalence of dealing with the image while it is being made. The defiance and the ball, the pause and the action, the uncontrolled fate and the planned desire-"I don't hear music when I write it. I write it in order to hear something I haven't heard yet", as stated by John Cage , deeply impactful in Hattnher's practice. This open posture not only illustrates the nuanced dynamics of the creative process but places the painter, a figure of action, into a realm of stillness, while the image, usually seen as passive, 

takes center stage. The painting performs, even unmoving. 

As in John Cage's and Stephen Drury's In a Landscape, music from 1948, the two artists bend a robust repertoire of erudite music into experimentation. The multisensorial and melancholy music do not reference a Western musical tradition in easily recognizable citations but in a deep comprehension-and subversion-of its structure. These experimentations are familiar to Hattnher, and the pairing of music and painting in the reading of his work-and also in Cage's and Drury's In a Landscape-is not by chance. The vivid aspects of the creative process analogous to the reoperation of erudite knowledge can be exemplified through Hattnher's profound admiration of the works of Albert York and Giorgio Morandi, to name just a few-the juxtaposition of still life and landscape in York's paintings, mainly the ones between 1982 and 1983; and dissolution of the dem that often prevents the merging of abstraction and figuration in Morandi's work.

In timbre-enriching brushstrokes, Hattnher's paintings balance the modesty of an attempt-as if proclaiming it is just a seemingly effortless attempt-and the dazzle of its assertive power, always rooted in profound erudition. The artist transmutes this ambiguity in the uneven rectangles, in the heterogeneity of the paint handling in the chromatic bodies, and in the active dialogue with grand themes of the history of painting-an exchange solidified through Hattnher's extreme awareness of the tradition of his craft. In this show, there is a direct reference to the last flowers painted by Édouard Manet through a 1988 dedicated book. By painting its cover-what Hattnher has previously done with publications on Louise Bourgeois, Henri Matisse, Cy Twombly, and John Cage (again, as a chorus)-, he does not only refer to Manet's painted flowers themselves but the endless reminiscences of memory that surround his relations with these paintings through and outside the book: the dark brown still-life atmosphere that was in the back of each flower vase; the decisiveness of some single brushstrokes that compose petals; the linen-and-gilded-wood frames that crowned most of the flower paintings but were left out in the book's reproductions; the slightly faded, sunburnt book sleeve in emerald green; the analogic grainy aspect of the photographed painting elected to stamp its cover. 

In another work, Hattnher paints a turquoise mosaic of white lilies under a vast, arid landscape scarred by a curved path. It resembles the image of the same lily but replicated as if seen through a green-textured glass, repeating its image in multiple positions. The glass's refractions would cause their subtle deformations, caused by minor variations of thickness and pigment concentration that compose the glass's honeycomb-like texture, creating new optic and chromatic phenomena. A myriad of fables is always possible when looking at Hattnher's paintings, with an encouraging will to imagine about the painter's visual experiences.

Proposing an aesthetics of receptivity, Hattnher's deliberations always respond to demands presented by the painting in an open dialogue with the pictorial and poetic situations he is facing. These meditative resonances are crucially singular to the moment they are timely anchored, which cannot be repeated and are, therefore, intensely unique. In Timing Notes, the artist presents serenely transcendent paintings with well-defined, balanced lyrical magnitude, structuring a mirrored flux that goes back and forth between memorial experiences and visual incidents. Hattnher, a musician with the keenest ears and eyes to the surrounding euphonic soundscape, actively listens to the painting, waiting for a cue to start playing. Always uncertain, this cue is sometimes unheard but sensed; at other times, extremely loud but missed. This seismic indication can be misleading-what often makes him cover and repaint the canvas-but also frequently precise, composing a changeable mosaic of chords. An image, then, is a matter of time.

- Mateus Nunes, PhD