Mark Grotjahn

In the past few days, I have been playing around with colour for a project and experimenting with its inherent emotive qualities. It still never ceases to amaze me how much expression the entire spectrum of colours can produce. In doing this project, I was reminded of a painter whose work I encountered a few years ago - Mark Grotjahn’s butterfly paintings.

Drawing influence from both modernist abstraction and pop culture, Mark Grotjahn’s paintings are intimate seductions, slipping between hard-edged design and emotive expression. Using perspective as a skewed logic, Grotjahn’s canvases often incorporate two vanishing points in close proximity; from a doubled ‘centre’ Untitled (Green Butterfly) radiates bands of golden hues, each creating a deception of space. Applied in thick impasto, their sleek forms dissolve into terrains of concentrated brushwork giving an effect of physical solidity. With each triangle drafted in a single opaque layer, the canvas’s texture and traces of under-painting create subtly shifting tones, flirting between the illusive and the concrete.

Mark Grotjahn’s Untitled evokes a sense of the metaphysical. Set atop an effused abstracted ground, his forms stretch and recede in the convoluted logic of linear perspective. Executed in coloured pencil, the optical illusion of adjoining rainbow-toned lines becomes compounded as a feat of concentration. Each band painstakingly filled by the artist’s hand, Grotjahn’s geometric form is delineated by the embossed traces of his endeavour, imprinting his personal gestures within an emblem of perfection.

Using natural phenomenon as a starting point for abstraction, Grotjahn’s paintings straddle the polarities of artifice and nature. His efferent composition conveys a sensation of sublime weightless energy through simplified form. Similarly, his process and title reference the romantic vision of blooming jacaranda flowers: revealing only a hint of green under-painting, his canvas explodes in a torrent of purple hue. Transferring the experience of observation to an intrigue of creative possibility, Grotjahn harnesses the mysticism of nature through aesthetic formality. (Saatchi Gallery)