Micha Patiniott creates atmospheric, lyrical minimalist paintings of everyday objects and processes in flux, blurring the boundaries between the personal, mundane, profane, cosmic, and mystical. Close-up subjects, such as a blank sheet of paper, the pulse of intimate body parts, the curving of a mathematical object, or the ambiguity of a turning portrait, are transformed into sensuous otherworldliness.

Bodies and objects gently float and are in the midst of changing form—they may vanish entirely, or exist in indeterminate stages of becoming. Some parts remain enigmatically blurred and abstracted, while others emerge with sharp clarity. A restrained palette of mono or duo chrome colors is juxtaposed with a shifting of local colors to the psychedelic. Motifs are shown individually or repeated in rhythmic patterns, often zoomed in on and decontextualized by placing them in enigmatically empty surroundings, and stripped of narrative content.

A play of nebulous light and skewed colors alludes to a contemporary take on historical painting techniques such as impressionism and sfumato, and explore the flux between spirit and matter. These spectral presences blur spatialities, temporalities, and corporalities, where boundaries between inner experience and outer world become fluid.

Most motifs are explored through series, revealing patterns, echoes, and divergences. These series suggest cyclical concepts like entering, expanding, contracting, breathing, turning, pumping, shimmering, shifting, reflecting, transforming, and repeating. They bridge the micro and personal experience, with the macro and universal. The repeated motifs are intertwined with historical references, contemporary culture, science, and science fiction, weaving them into an imaginative realm full of connections and possibilities.

Materialities hover between glasslike transparency and marble opacity, the human skin, and intangible fields of energy. These manipulations of objecthood allow for the possibility of multiple interpretations of a singular shape, encouraging an inquiry into the nature of perception and proposing a less dualistic view between real and imaginary, memory and the present, dreamworld, and waking state.

“Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting gaily about. He knew nothing about Zhuangzi. Then suddenly he awoke and he was at once solidly and unmistakably himself, Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know whether he was a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or was a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Surely there’s a difference between Zhuangzi and a butterfly. This is what we call the transformation of things.” - 4th century BC, from the Zhuangzi, a Daoist text by master Zhuangzi

The dichotomies of presence and absence, along with visibility and erasure, mirror the meandering experiences of selfhood, particularly within the context of altered mental states and queer experiences. Patiniott considers transformation and impermanence to be a vital aspect of encountering the transcendent and the sublime, echoing the metamodernist approach of navigating the ever-shifting perspectives of self and no-self.

Through a web of visual metaphors, he seeks to connect the metaphysical to the personal, creating a dynamic visual experience that invites ongoing dialogue with the viewer. Rather than positing fixed events, Patiniott’s work functions like a fluid network of visual koans, offering a rhizomatic stream of perception.

“We work with being,
but non-being is what we use”
- 600 BC, koan from the Tao Te Ching

Micha Patiniott lives and works in Amsterdam. He was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2006-2007) and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2008-2009 and 2023-2024). International solo and group exhibitions include the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam; PuntWG (Amsterdam); Cinnamon (Rotterdam); Heden (Den Haag); WHATSPACE (Tilburg); MKgalerie (Rotterdam/Berlin); Galerie Sturm (Nuremberg); Dordrechts Museum; Whitechapel Gallery (London); Arti et Amicitiae (Amsterdam); Museum Hilversum; the Provincetown Art Association and Museum; Provinciehuis Noord-Holland (Haarlem); and Anna Zorina Gallery (New York).