To touch a cloud while standing on the ground: André Hemer

Essay by Valentina Schatzer

A fold catches the light, then swallows it. A pale blue edge curls towards us; behind it, a dark recess holds the eye. Something opens like a petal, glossy and faintly viscous. It could be paint, fabric, a fragment of skin. Recognition arrives in pieces. In André Hemer's paintings and sculptures, the eye senses texture before it can settle on a substance. Surfaces gather into bodies, images acquire thickness, and what seemed within reach slips back into illusion.

How much of its material life does an image carry with it? In To touch a cloud while standing on the ground, Hemer gives this question a tangible presence. Paint becomes an image of paint, then encounters fresh pigment and sculptural additions. A ridge may project from the canvas or belong entirely to the image beneath it. The eye searches for an edge, follows a shadow, and revises its understanding of what occupies the space before it.

In Hemer's work, the distinction between appearance and physical substance becomes increasingly uncertain. Objects and painted surfaces are captured and digitally transformed before painting introduces further texture and depth. An image retains the suggestion of volume even as its material substance changes. A shadow preserved within the image can meet one cast by the present object. What appears continuous may bring together encounters with light that occurred in different places, at different stages of making.

A painting is one moment in a form's continuing life. Hemer constructs virtual three-dimensional environments in which objects, images and digitally generated forms acquire new relationships. Images may be wrapped around 3D-scanned forms or, through generative scripts, become the basis for new volumes. Within these environments, elements are assembled and rearranged, giving rise to compositions for paintings and suggesting new directions for sculpture. Each work carries a lineage without displaying it in full.

This marks a shift in Hemer's relationship to the world beyond the studio. Where plein-air observation once led more directly into painting, images gathered outdoors now pass through virtual space. Within these new environments, the observed world becomes the material for imagining another, where light, colour and form can be recomposed beyond the circumstances of their original capture. The distance between observation and painting becomes a space of invention, where images retain traces of their origins while opening up possibilities beyond those of direct observation.

The idea of a skin connects these changes of state to the experience of a surface. A skin gives a body an exterior, follows its contours and makes it visible. Yet it has a texture, thickness and presence of its own. Whether wrapped around a virtual form or given physical substance through printing, painting and sculptural additions, the image acquires a covering that both reveals and transforms what lies beneath. A pictured fold suggests thickness on a flatter surface; subsequent material gives that illusion new relief. The skin may seem to adhere closely to the form it describes, then gather, curl or project beyond it.

Dressing an image gives it another body. A painted addition covers part of a print while introducing edges and shadows that occupy actual space. Wrapping and unwrapping become acts of looking: the eye follows a fold towards what it appears to conceal, only to encounter another surface. Covering can also disclose. An accumulation of paint interrupts the printed field and, in doing so, makes its flatness newly apparent. The work's construction becomes perceptible precisely where one surface resists another.

Across the paintings, blue and lavender forms curl around dark cavities; reds and oranges gather into heated clusters. Their contours evoke petals, crumpled fabric and thick folds of paint. Plastic filament and, in the sculptures, marble-dust compound give these apparently pliable forms a different material character. Elsewhere, interrupted monochromes bring a quieter register to this vocabulary. A sustained field of colour establishes continuity, while an interruption makes its extent and internal differences newly visible.

Arcs and ovals extend this attention to the perimeter. Their curved outlines recall the shaped pictorial fields of Italian ceiling painting, where the boundaries of architecture could appear to dissolve into another space. In such works, the painted image transforms the ceiling from a physical limit into an apparent opening. Hemer's paintings revisit this tension between a bounded surface and the depth it suggests, though without allowing the illusion to settle. Their curved supports participate in the image while asserting their own material presence. Viewed obliquely, the edge reveals its thickness, returning the eye to the object on the wall. The apparent opening has a body of its own.

In the sculptures, the relationship between surface and depth unfolds through movement. Related forms gather into volumes where folds turn inward and recesses change as the viewer shifts position. Colour passes across surfaces that cannot be seen all at once. A form familiar from a painting now requires another kind of attention, unfolding through successive viewpoints. The work's appearance develops with the time we spend beside it.

A pictured shadow meets a real edge; a fold opens onto a depth that may or may not exist. Looking follows these shifts, moving between what the image shows and what the object holds. Each work gives the continuing transformations of image and material a temporary presence. A skin holds the image together, but every turn of its surface offers another way in.